PROVIENCE - Rock band Collective Soul sells a lot of records - their first two albums both sold more than a million copies each - but, so far, they haven't gotten a lot of respect.

Maybe it's because their songs are so catchy, which tends to make critics suspicious.

``Either they like us or they don't, and I guess there are more of the latter,'' said guitarist Dean Roland in a phone interview. ``It's easy to say don't listen to them, or we don't care about them, but it's not that easy. We make honest music, from the heart, and it means a lot to us. What we're doing is not fashionable, and we realize that.''

Collective Soul, which hails from Georgia, plays polished, guitar-driven pop rock, penned by Ed Roland, Dean's brother. The band comes to Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel in Providence Sunday night.

The band's latest album, Disciplined Breakdown, is rawer and angrier than the band's previous work, thanks to a legal dispute with former manager Bill Richardson. (The terms of the settlement prevent band members from discussing the dispute in any detail).

With all their assets frozen by the lawsuit, the band retreated to a small cabin in the Georgia woods to work on the songs that would turn into Disciplined Breakdown.

Drummer Shane Evans was in the kitchen; bassist Will Turpin was in the breakfast room; everyone else was in the living room.

``I wouldn't recommend it to anybody,'' Roland said. ``It was fun at first, but it got old.''

It's certainly easy to interpret the lyrics on Disciplined Breakdown as references to the band's legal and emotional battle with Richardson.

``You pushed me down/ For all the world to see/ I guess that's the price/ For my loyalty,'' Ed Roland sings on Blame. And Precious Declaration, the album's first single, refers to the settlement that ended the lawsuit: ``Precious declaration reads/ Yours is yours and mine you leave alone now.''

``It's about hope and freedom. It meant we were able to be in control of our career again,'' said Dean Roland. ``We try to bring something positive out of this.'' So Forgiveness is about trying to get past the anger and move on.

``This record stems from the emotions we were all feeling at the time,'' Roland said.

The Roland brothers - Ed, at 33, is nine years older than Dean - are sons of a Baptist minister who did not exactly encourage his sons to listen to rock music. (Now the senior Rolands watch MTV religiously to catch Collective Soul's videos).

Ed Roland was 13 when he bought his first rock record - Elton John's Greatest Hits. He was hooked, started playing guitar and began listening to The Police, the Beatles and the Cars.

The Cars inspired Roland to come to Boston, where he spent a year at the Berklee school of music. Returning to Georgia, he started working at a recording studio, where he was also able to write and record his own material and acquire the technical knowledge that helps make Collective Soul's albums sound so catchy.

He wrote the band's first hit, Shine, after coming across a half-finished version on an old tape. The song became a regional hit, which led to a contract with Atlantic Records.

A discouraged Roland had actually broken up Collective Soul, but he put the band back together as success beckoned. The band's first album, 1994's Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid sold 1.3 milion copies. The followup, simply called Collective Soul, bettered that, with sales of 1.8 million.

The next step, according to the trade journal Billboard, is to remove the ``faceless'' tag from the band. Dean Roland said that's not much of a concern for the band.

``We want to be known, but the main focus is the music,'' he said. ``People listen to the music, they buy the records, listen to the radio, and that's what's important to us.''