Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns' batteries are recharged. His creative juices are flowing. He's stoked to share his misery with hundreds of thousands of fans the world over with his Australian rock trio's brand new album, Neon Ballroom.

Amazing what a nice, long sabbatical will do for a 19-year-old.

"Last year we made a conscious decision not to play for about 14 months, just so we could get the spark back," says singer-guitarist Johns, dialing in for a chat on the eve of Neon Ballroom's release earlier this week. Silverchair deliver their new platter in person at the Warehouse Saturday.

Johns' upbeat tone contrasts starkly with the moody Neon Ballroom, especially as he explains his emotional and musical shutdown that inspired the record.

"I was crazy when I started it," he says, only half-jokingly. "It kind of gave me back a level of sanity."

The previous four years had been crazy enough for Silverchair: Johns, drummer Ben Gillies and bassist Chris Joannou got a surprise dose of rock stardom at age 15 when a demo tape they made spawned an international hit, the Pearl Jam clone Tomorrow, and the massive selling Frogstomp album. Freakshow, their bitter but more original-sounding 1997 reaction to stacks of bad reviews, found them fighting a career-backlash before they'd even finished high school.

Johns felt as if the band had been written off before coming into their own, creatively.

"The first two albums felt very much like a part-time thing," he says. "We didn't have room to branch out."

Then Silverchair graduated, literally and figuratively.

Johns promptly shut himself off from the outside world, living in a vacuum while dreaming up Neon Ballroom's web of string sections and hard rock anthems.

"I made a conscious effort not to listen to music for about three months," says Johns. "I moved into a house and I didn't even take a stereo. I only left the house to buy groceries. I just sat and wrote for about three months.

"I was having a lot of psychological troubles with anxiety," he adds. "I had really bad phobias and I couldn't leave the house or I'd get scared.

'Cleansing thing'

"I was just writing poetry to myself as a kind of cleansing thing. I ended up getting attached to the words, so I changed them into a more lyrical format and wrote music around that."

After that, he says, things were surprisingly easy.

"I had such a clear vision of what I wanted, so there was no confusion in the studio, but at the same time it took a lot longer because I didn't stop until it was perfect. To me, anyway."

Steps to include ornate orchestration on a few tracks even led to legendary eccentric David Helfgott -- the pianist immortalized in the film Shine -- slamming the ivories on opening tune Emotion Sickness.

But Johns and producer Launay took care not to let these devices spill over. Neon Ballroom is hardly an orchestral pop record and owes more to Metallica than it does to latter-day symphony-rockers like the Smashing Pumpkins.

Silverchair did at first lean toward an entire orchestral album, before thinking better of it.

'Too pretentious'

"Too pretentious," Johns says with a laugh.

"This time I was just trying to prove to myself that I'm more than just a hard rock songwriter. I wanted something to show for my dedication to playing music."

The experience also gave Johns new insight on his band's early days. He hesitates to blame his bad nerves on a rather hapless career path.

"We wanted to play music to big crowds of people, but we were a bit young for it," he says. "I'm definitely proud that we got through that whole thing. A lot of bands would have played up to the whole age thing to make more money. We let the music do the talking and stuck to promoting ourselves as a music band and not some kind of teen piece of s---.

"People advised us to take the money and run. I'm proud that we didn't.