A straight-up shot

Brody ARMSTRONG bounces a small rubber ball on the concrete floor and laughs raucously as a pit bull named Redrum takes off in pursuit. She repeats the process, sending the ball bouncing madly off the walls, beams, instrument cases and other surfaces inside the Van Nuys rehearsal facility.

Kneeling on the floor and shouting encouragement, Armstrong seems more like a carefree youngster playing with a favorite pet than the rock world’s next big thing, or at least its most controversial siren since Courtney Love.

If nothing else, this game of toss and chase must represent a momentary escape from the pressures attending the major-label launch of her band, the Distillers.

“It’s just intense times,” the 24-year-old singer-guitarist says. “We haven’t had a moment to stop and take a breath. Sometimes you feel like you’re suffocating. But at the same time you can’t complain. We’re doing what we love, but it’s a lot of ... work.

“We’re basically booked up to next August. And to think about that, to really think about all the work.... It makes me want to move to a farm and milk cows instead of being a cow that gets milked constantly.”

But as far as Distillers partisans are concerned, this has been in the cards for a while. Last year’s album “Sing Sing Death House,” on the L.A. independent label Hellcat, brought their raw but catchy punk-rock and Armstrong’s shredded voice to the forefront, marking her as a punk princess whose ascent to the throne, many felt, was just a matter of time.

“Sing Sing” made an indelible impression, concentrating feelings of oppression and release into a 28-minute package that honored punk fundamentals while straining against its conventions.

It was mainly in Armstrong’s rusty-razor singing, which brought humor and a swaggering, vivacious personality to topics ranging from her own troubled upbringing in Australia to the American suffragette movement to good old-fashioned angst.

Kids responded, KROQ-FM played the album cut “City of Angels,” and Warner Bros. Records stepped in and signed a deal for the group.

When the new album “Coral Fang” comes out on Tuesday, it will be a joint venture between Warner and Hellcat, which eases the little problem of Brody’s in-progress divorce from Tim Armstrong, the leader of the highly esteemed punk band Rancid and the co-owner of Hellcat.

It’s been messy.

Since breaking off with her husband last year, Brody has been branded as a climber who used the well-known musician as a steppingstone to stardom. She didn’t earn any sympathy by posing recently for photos in Rolling Stone playing tongue tag with her new boyfriend, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme.

And signing with a corporate record company isn’t the kind of thing that sits well with purist punk fans, as Courtney will tell you.

Outside the Distillers’ sold-out show at the Glass House in Pomona two days after the rehearsal, a kid was handing out fliers with Armstrong’s picture and the words “Money Whore.”

Armstrong has heard it all before. Sitting on a sofa in a bare room at the rehearsal complex, she takes a drag on a cigarette and intensifies her gaze.

“Other people’s opinions hold no relevance in my life,” she says, brandishing a longneck Budweiser. “I know what went on. The closest people to me, my family, knows what went on. I can’t defend myself against those accusations. And that’s all they are, is accusations.”

For Armstrong, it’s just one more challenge in a life that’s been packed with them.

“My greatest satisfaction in life,” she says, “is to be greatly underestimated and then rise above, and beat the odds into a bloody pulp.”

A rocky path

After 10 minutes of bouncing and chasing, Armstrong and the dog are spent. The animal, the ball clamped between its jaws, stretches out on the floor and stares longingly at the singer, who hovers over him.

“I think he was abused, that doggy,” she says, stepping outside into the late afternoon’s blinding heat. “I always had a natural understanding for things that are broken.”

As a girl, she says, she was always collecting strays, perhaps to compensate for the turmoil at home. Her mother kicked out her unfaithful husband when Brody was 2. Things began to stabilize when her mother remarried, but when Brody hit her teens, it all went haywire.

“I was a young girl who wanted to break out and see the world, who thought she knew everything about the world. I was promiscuous, I didn’t want to go to school, I didn’t assimilate with my peers, I hung out with older people.”

She also dabbled in drugs, and though she excelled at art and literature, she got kicked out of schools, roaming around Melbourne as she lived on the dole and worked menial jobs. She developed a social conscience working and living at an activist commune, but it was an aimless life until music took hold.

“It was my salvation,” she says. She’d listened to Cyndi Lauper and Bruce Springsteen as a kid, but now Nirvana and other grunge-era bands entered the picture. They gave way to punk, most notably the world of the ‘80s British band Discharge and its aggressive, underground ilk.

She began playing in bands and was 17 when she met Armstrong at a music festival in Sydney where both their groups were playing.

She followed him back to Los Angeles and formed the Distillers, going through personnel shuffles, releasing two Hellcat albums and spreading the word on the Warped Tour and an arena-rocking bill with No Doubt and Garbage.

Now stabilized with the lineup of bassist Ryan Sinn, drummer Andy Granelli and guitarist Tony Bradley behind Armstrong, the Distillers are trying to keep the old spirit alive amid the growing attention and inevitable complaints that they’ve gone too slick on “Coral Fang.”

They just laugh that off. “Sing Sing Death House” might have its engaging rawness, but they shudder when they recall trying to record 14 songs in one week.

“I think there’s a lot of bands out there who are quite happy making the same record 10 times in a row,” Armstrong says. “We’re not one of those bands.... This record is what I’ve been hearing in my head for a long time.”

“I thought she had an extraordinary voice,” says “Coral Fang’s” producer Gil Norton. “We don’t really have anything with that much attitude at the moment. It’s guttural and very believable. You listen to this and you think she means it.”

The textures might be cleaner and the musical range wider, but there’s still an urgency -- and that headlong pace. Armstrong wrote most of the songs in February during a visit to Australia, and she packed them with images of ominous violence and trembling anticipation.

“Total liberation,” she says of the writing and the themes. “Just feeling like a caged animal for most of my life and someone breaking the cage open. Actually it was I who broke the cage open. I bit through the chain-link fence and let myself out.”

Turmoil and moving on

If you’re just starting to notice the name Brody Armstrong, you can start to forget it. With her divorce from Tim Armstrong imminent, she’s taken a new surname, Dalle. Pronounced “doll,” it’s her mother’s maiden name.

If only everything were so easily altered.

“I have the man’s name tattooed on my backside with ‘Everlasting’ underneath it. That’s the kiss of death,” she says, dropping a cigarette butt into her empty beer bottle. “I don’t know, what happens between two people is so personal, it’s something that you can never really explain. It’s over.

“I wish all the best for him. There’s no bad blood on my side. That’s why I haven’t talked about it. This is not ... tabloid [stuff]. People would like to make it that, but it’s not.... It’s a deep cut. It doesn’t help that it’s referenced in every article. It’s a constant reminder.”

(Tim Armstrong declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Brody Armstrong, or Dalle, is standing backstage at the Glass House. The showroom of the Pomona rock club is packed with an audience of Mohawked and mascara’d punk-rock kids, waiting for the concert that will be the first step in the Distillers’ new era.

The camaraderie within the Distillers is constantly evident, especially between Armstrong and guitarist Bradley.

They met when he was an employee at Epitaph Records, Hellcat’s parent company, and he worked for the band as a guitar technician and in various other capacities before joining the group last year.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with Brody in L.A. We, like, drive around and just goof off,” he says, sitting in the band’s tour bus earlier in the evening.

“She’s a really, really strong woman. I’ve seen her go through a lot of different things and a lot of changes ....The Distillers have gotten a lot of attention lately. The shows are getting bigger and the buses are getting bigger and all that, but she’s still the same girl I met at Epitaph.”

It’s almost time for the show, and Armstrong laughs when it’s pointed out that one name that hasn’t come up during the interview is Courtney Love, a name that seems destined to appear in anything written about the Distillers.

Armstrong, who played on two songs for Love’s coming solo album, admires her elder’s fortitude. “She’s survived a Greek tragedy -- all the elements of betrayal and violence and love and heartache in front of 300 million people. That’s kind of intense. But she’s funny. She has a great sense of humor.”

Did Love have advice for her heir apparent?

“I didn’t ask for very much. Because the comparison is constant, I was just like, you know, ‘You made it on your own -- I’d like to make it on my own.’ ”