Apples in Stereo will perform poppy tunes from its latest CD, New Magnetic Wonder, at the Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale on Friday.

It’s not surprising that Apples in Stereo frontman Robert Schneider has lofty goals for the band’s records. After all, its latest CD, New Magnetic Wonder, did include a snippet of a song using a new musical scale that he invented.

In press materials, Schneider said he wanted to make a CD that felt “life-affirming and real, yet ultra hi-fi and unreal at the same time,” though he lamented that such a record may not be technically feasible.

Schneider’s bandmate, bassist Eric Allen, isn’t quite so critical.

“I would disagree (with Schneider) and say this album to me is all those things,” Allen said in a recent phone interview. “But I know how it is. Robert’s got stuff in his head that he’d like to hear on tape, and has not yet.”

Fans of creative, finely crafted power pop likely will side with Allen once they hear New Magnetic Wonder, which could very well end 2007 as the year’s best pop album.

That Apples in Stereo returned to action with such a stellar effort won’t come as a surprise to fans of the group’s previous CDs.

Beginning with the 1995 CD, Fun Trick Noisemaker, the Apples — Schneider, Allen, guitarist John Hill and drummer Hilarie Sidney — had released five previous CDs of finely crafted music that ranged from textured psychedelic pop to stripped-down guitar pop.

But, as the five-year gap between the band’s 2002 CD, Velocity of Sound, and the new album suggests, New Magnetic Wonder was both an ambitious and challenging endeavor, with a number of outside factors contributing to its long delay.

For one thing, several band members took time to work on other projects.

Another issue was far more personal — the divorce of husband and wife Schneider and Sidney. Although Sidney remained with the group for the entire New Magnetic Wonder project, she recently left to devote her energies to her other band, High Water Marks.

“I think they did really well with it for a while, and certainly a lot better than I would have done under the circumstances,” Allen said when asked if the divorce had been disruptive for the band. “But yeah, I think they’re both in a really good place now and happy with their lives, and it’s just kind of natural for Hilarie to separate from the band.”

The recording of New Magnetic Wonder stretched out over 18 months and involved work in studios in five different cities. Allen said the CD — which was co-released by Yep Roc Records and actor Elijah Wood’s new label Simian Records — turned out better because of the time and effort that went into it.

“We really got to spend a lot of time listening to rough mixes and the kind of stuff that was unfinished, and it just sort of germinated,” he said. “If we had the money to crank the album out in two months, I don’t think it would be nearly as rich as it is now.”

The multifaceted and typically upbeat collection’s songs “Can You Feel It?” and “7 Stars” recall the peppy pop of the 2000 CD, The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone, while the group’s more raucous, guitar-centric sound emerges on such tunes as “Skyway” and “Sundial Song.” Between those extremes fall songs like “Same Old Drag” (a keyboard-based tune that might inspire comparisons to Ben Folds), the gorgeous melancholy ballad “Play Tough” and the dreamy “Open Eyes.”

The sonic detail in the music, of course, will take some doing to re-create in a live setting. To meet that challenge, Apples in Stereo has expanded from the previous four-person lineup to six band members, with keyboardists Bill Doss (formerly of Olivia Tremor Control) and John Ferguson (of Ulysses) joining Schneider, Hill, Allen and new drummer John Dufilho (formerly of the Deathray Davies).

The new lineup obviously has created a very different dynamic onstage.

“For me, it feels kind of like a new band,” Allen said. “When you’ve hung out with someone (Sidney) for 10 or 11 years, you know, it’s like a comfortable pair of shoes, or sometimes an uncomfortable pair of shoes. But you know everything about them, about their families. You’ve spent so much time traveling together. So, in a way, it makes me kind of feel like I’m in a new band, which I like the feeling of, actually, because it will kind of break you out of some of your comfort areas and make you think about things differently than you have in a while.”

Apples in Stereo will perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Culture Room, 3045 N. Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $15 at www.ticketmaster.com.