Laid-Back Mr. Mirainga Starts ‘Burnin’ Rubber’ : Pop music: The band that didn’t tour, didn’t have a record deal and didn’t have a song, now has it all.

Mr. Mirainga’s three founders started the band nearly five years ago for no other reason than to hang out and bang out some songs, with low-stress fun and ample free drink as their hoped-for rewards.

Mirainga didn’t tour. Mirainga didn’t look for a record deal. Mirainga didn’t particularly care that hardly anyone came to its shows. Mirainga (pronounced muh-RAIN-gay) had no qualms about misspelling merengue, the Caribbean dance that spawned both its name and the idea of incorporating the Latin rhythms that spice its punk-pop sound.

And now, Mirainga downplays its sudden and improbable transformation into a band that does tour, does have a record deal and does indeed have a song, “Burnin’ Rubber,” that is getting played on MTV and aired on modern-rock radio stations across the land.

To hear the shaven-headed men of Mr. Mirainga tell it, they remain, despite opportunity’s knock, the same old screw-ups with limited horizons, low expectations and no interest in reforming themselves into sturdy professionals.

“We’re not a headlining band,” says affably crusty bassist Hedge (Greg Jones). “It’s a lot easier to play a drunk, sloppy set when you’re not the headliner. If you’re the headliner, people expect you to play a long show, and we don’t like playing more than a half-hour. You look across at the bar and think, ‘I’d rather be on the bar stool drinking than up here playing.’ ”

Hedge, sitting with his bandmates in a dark corner of Linda’s Doll Hut, the Anaheim club that is the heart of Orange County’s grass-roots rock scene, allows that Mr. Mirainga has had its transitory bursts of get-up-and-go. In fact, after the October release of its debut EP, “[Expletive] the Scene,” Mirainga got up and went on tour for two months, opening for the bands 311 and 1000 Mona Lisas.

“We thought, ‘We’re gonna be a real band,’ that all this touring would make us tight,” Hedge says of Mirainga’s pre-tour bout of budding professionalism. “No. It all went to [expletive].”

Nevertheless, with its first full-length album, “Mr. Mirainga,” due out Tuesday on Way Cool Music, a new, Orange County-based affiliate of MCA Records, the band’s immediate plans call for more heavy touring. The members may look and talk like slackers, but Mirainga, perhaps despite itself, still somewhat resembles a band that is going to give success a shot.

It’s a shot that, given the quality of the band’s two recordings, is well worth taking. Between six-packs, Mr. Mirainga somehow managed to write and record persuasive and varied music that combines punk rawness with a savvy sense of melody and song architecture.

The most distinctive departures from the punk-pop norm are those Caribbean polyrhythms. Mirainga also cannily shifts dynamics, throws in some Seattle-style slab chords and, on “Safety First,” produces one of the catchiest, hardest-driving refrains this side of the Smashing Pumpkins.

Guitarist Steve Gunderman lists non-punks Pat Metheny, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eddie Van Halen as his big influences, while singer Craig Poturalski fronts the band with stringy yowling that’s tuneful and expressively apt for playing the misfits, losers and taboo-trampling dreamers who inhabit its lyrics.

Mirainga began when Hedge, a veteran of the Orange County punk bands Doggy Style and D.I., decided he needed a change of scenery and moved to Mesa, Ariz., in 1990. Soon he had hooked up with Arizonans Poturalski and Gunderman; the band relocated back to Orange County after just one gig in Mesa (drummer Steve Garcia, another D.I. alumnus, joined earlier this year).

But can the outwardly indifferent Mr. Mirainga be bothered to climb the ladder that most of its competitors will grasp with avid ambition?

“Whether they like it or not, they’re turning into a professional band,” says J.P. Boquette, a local promoter who became Mr. Mirainga’s manager and shopped the band to record labels after hearing its demo tape. “They know how to get on stage and play now. Before, they liked to screw around, and now they know they’ve got to be professional for 35 minutes of their life.”

When the band starts thinking of being tight and sharp, then comes up short, it can be “a little stressful,” Hedge says. “That’s when I hate it. The next day [after a sloppy show], it’ll hit me, [and I have to tell myself], ‘Don’t start stressing.’ If we took ourselves more seriously and concentrated on being a professional live band, we’d probably sound better, but it wouldn’t be fun anymore.

“We’ll see what happens,” Hedge says. “We’re not expecting [anything]. It would be very satisfying to continue in punk bars and make enough money to pay the rent and eat and drink and be merry. I’d like to tour, record, have a house and a fridge full of beer. If we could pull that off, it would be cool.”