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Losing a founding member would be reason enough for most bands to call it quits.

The guys in Augustana, however, saw it as an opportunity.

When Josiah Rosen, who founded Augustana with Dan Layus at Greenville College in Greenville, Ill., left the group in April of last year, the band's major-label debut, "All the Stars and Boulevards," was on the shelves. Now that Layus is the sole driver behind the wheel of the band's ship, however, the pop-rock sounds that dominated "All the Stars" is being tempered with a healthy dose of roots rock, according to drummer Justin South.

"With Josiah, we had a kind of indie, more emo-oriented influence, for lack of a better word — along the lines of the Get Up Kids or Jimmy Eat World or Coldplay or Oasis," South told The Daily Times this week. "With the departure of Josiah, we've definitely embraced the side of Dan's influences, and he listens to a lot of Wilco and Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris and Tom Petty and Ryan Adams.

"We've found a new guitar player who had been playing and gigging in Nashville, and he's got more of a playing style that matches Dan's songwriting. So we're going in more of an American rock direction, and it's one we're excited about. 'Stars and Boulevards' definitely had more of the rock-pop structure of the format, in the playing and a lot of the writing, but on this new record, it's just fun for us to play.

"There's jams, there's solos, there's room for improvisation," he added. "It won't be the same from night to night; the music feels more focused on touch and tastefulness and stuff like that — more along the lines of stuff we really listen to."

Not that the guys are dismissing the effort put into "All the Stars and Boulevards"; after all, Rosen and Layus quite school and moved to Los Angeles to make it big in the music scene. Epic Records signed the band, and "Stars and Boulevards" included the single "Boston," which debuted as an eye-catching video and landed on Billboard's Heatseekers chart. The group has opened for such acts as Switchfoot, The Fray, Counting Crows, Snow Patrol and the Goo Goo Dolls, and Thursday the guys will return to Blue Cats in Knoxville's Old City.

"Every time we swing through Tennessee, we always have great shows," South said. "People just seem to come out to our shows there, and we just love playing down in the South."

Augustana recently completed work on pre-production demos for a new album, tentatively titled "Can't Love, Can't Hurt," South said. In May, the group will reconvene with producer Brendan O'Brien to record the record, which South hopes will be in stores by the end of the year.

"We've been writing for the last three years, ever since we finished 'All the Stars and Boulevards,' and we've tried out the songs at soundchecks and stuff like that, so we're pretty much ready to go in and record," South said. "I think it's going to be more of a subtle approach, because we've really been digging records like 'Wrecking Ball' (by Emmylou Harris) and 'Pneumonia' (by Whiskeytown); those albums have all these little touches that, five years later, you find yourself still discovering and loving. That's what we kind of fell in love with, and those are the kinds of records we aspire to make."