Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes comes clean about the band's off-kilter approach to making music, especially in light of recent experimental albums such as 1995's Thank You, 1997's Medazzaland and the new Pop Trash.

"Duran Duran has always been a little schizo,'' he says by phone from London. "We like bouncing off the walls and seeing what happens, running from one corner to another. We're interested in a lot of different music. I might be listening to Dr. Dre one minute and Britney Spears the next. I like pop music, but I also like darker stuff. We have a very broad spectrum of music from which we draw our inspiration.''

One listen to Pop Trash proves that. The album, Duran Duran's first for Disney-owned Hollywood Records, is at once dreamy and erratic, psychedelic and electronic, noisy and moody. From the ethereal first single, the ballad "Someone Else Not Me,'' to the dark, avant-garde club tune "Hallucinating Elvis,'' Pop Trash is the antithesis of today's teen pop fluff.

"There's a lot of things on this one,'' says Mr. Rhodes, who performs Thursday with band mates Simon LeBon and Warren Cuccurullo at Smirnoff Music Centre. "There's a lot of good humor in there, a few dance things, a few melodies.

"As an album, we feel it's our most complete.''

That line could be hard to swallow for die-hard fans from Duran Duran's '80s heyday. That's back when MTV made an event out of every video the band filmed and songs such as "Rio,'' "The Reflex,'' "Union of the Snake'' and the career-launching "Hungry Like the Wolf'' were radio staples.

Mr. Rhodes still embraces those tunes but realizes that after more than two decades in Duran Duran, there's no point in rewriting the past.

"I look at David Bowie,'' he says. "I remember when he went from Aladdin Sane to Diamond Dogs and suddenly he was doing Young Americans. If you want a career, you have to reinvent yourself.''

Reinventing, however, sometimes signifies commercial expiration. With the exception of two hits – "Ordinary World'' and "Come Undone'' from 1993's Duran Duran – the '90s have been unkind. The band is still viable enough to snag a major label and draw crowds to concerts, but pop radio has all but written it off. But onstage, in the heat of a live performance, classics such as "Planet Earth'' and "Girls on Film'' still immortalize the group.

"They've taken on a life of their own,'' he says. "Some of them have weaved their way into the fabric of our pop culture. I suppose that's what you hope for, that they do become something else. When we wrote them, they were just little songs we hoped would get on the radio, somebody would dance to them. But years later, they've become something else.''