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Few bands in pop music history have undergone as profound a metamorphosis as Weilheim, Germany’s The Notwist. What began as nothing more than one more German hard core punk band has become one of the most successful acts to blend electronic music with pop songwriting.

As one of the leading groups of the nascent lap-pop revolution, The Notwist fuses a strong pop songwriting sensibility with the glitches, clicks and hisses of abstract electronica. The group is composed of brothers Markus and Micha Acher on guitar; bass, electronic programmer/keyboard player Martin Gretschmann; and drummer Martin Messerschmidt.

“We never wanted to do the same stuff again,” Markus Acher said of his group’s stylistic shift. “We were always curious about different music and how it was made.”

It was this dissatisfaction with doing the same old thing that led the group, originally a trio, to seek out Gretschmann’s contribution.

“Martin was a friend of ours for a very long time,” said Markus. “He bought a sampler and started doing all this electronic stuff at the point where we became more and more interested in electronic music. We recognized that what he does with his sounds fit perfectly in the music we did at the moment.”

With Gretschmann enlisted as a full time member, the group began to explore different directions for their music.

“We always wanted to make a record that we also would like to listen to,” said Markus. The result was two albums, “12” and “Shrink,” that pushed the sound of the band into new territories, expanding the use of electronic elements and getting away from a pure straight-ahead rock sound.

Still, it was the heralded 2002 “Neon Golden” that broke the band into an international audience and thrust them to the forefront of the independent music world. It was also the record that most fully realized the collaborative potential of the band.

“‘Neon Golden’ was really a studio album, everybody composing for himself,” Markus said. “We met and exchanged things and everybody was doing some stuff for all the songs. It became more and more mixed; with the small electronic parts you can’t really recognize anymore who did what.”

The merging of individual elements is even more evident in the group’s live show, in which there is a strong improvisational feel.

“We try to leave it very open. (The electronic elements are) recorded on the laptop, but are not just a playback. There are many different effects, and (Gretschmann) tries to play it like an instrument,” Markus said.

However, the group also likes to stay true to its roots with their live performances.

“We still play old songs and we also play new songs with more distorted guitars,” Markus said.

Since the release of the record, the band has kept busy with a vast number of side projects within the highly collaborative electronic music scene. Markus Acher plays in Lali Puna, and brother Micha is one half of Ms. John Soda, two groups that are stylistically similar to The Notwist. Gretschmann, recording under his solo moniker Console, contributed a track to Bjork’s last album, “Vespertine,” and has recently released a solo record.

For the future, the band has plans to continue exploring the limits of their sound.

“We want to do something not so much song-oriented with The Notwist,” Markus said. “We did this soundcheck that was just instrumental and very quiet with lots of electronics, and now I guess we’re trying to do something else.”