Can Hives turn buzz into sales?

“You haven’t heard our new album,” Hives singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist told the crowd at the KROQ-FM (106.7) Weenie Roast concert last weekend. “But you already love it.”

Well, the singer has high expectations for his Swedish band’s “Tyrannosaurus Hives,” which will be released July 20. That’s no surprise. Much of Almqvist’s charming stage persona revolves around puffed-up boasts about how much the Hives are loved.

Off stage, though, he’s a bit more modest.

“If the people who liked our last album like this one, that will be enough,” he said during a break while taping a performance on the “Pepsi Smash” music show on Monday. “More would be good, of course. But the same would be fine.”

The “same” would mean U.S. sales of about 425,000 copies -- the number that the Hives’ “Veni Vidi Vicious” sold, nearly all of it after it was picked up by Warner Bros. Records in April 2002. (It was originally released here by independent Epitaph Records in September 2000.) The surge came as the band’s neo-garage-rock style took the spotlight alongside the similarly back-to-basics approaches of the Strokes and White Stripes.

But would 425,000 really be enough, considering the deal the Hives signed with Interscope Records at the peak of the last album’s rise two years ago? The contract reportedly is for more than $10 million over three albums.

Mark Williams, senior executive of A&R; at Interscope, says the company’s executives are not thinking in those terms.

“The reason we wanted to get involved with the Hives is we felt they were an exciting, fresh face of rock ‘n’ roll,” he says. “As far as the expectations go, we’re in business with these guys because they’re great. We expect to see the benefits artistically and commercially down the road. At this point, they have made a great album that shows growth from the last one and retained what everyone loves about them.”

Almqvist says the record company has not focused on sales mandates.

“I guess they have expectations. But there has not really been a lot of pressure.”

A big breakthrough is hardly guaranteed. For all the attention to the new wave of garage-rockers in the last couple of years, only the White Stripes has had album sales exceeding 1 million, with the 2003 album “Elephant” at 1.6 million, according to Neilsen SoundScan figures.

The Strokes’ “Room on Fire,” released in October, stands at 495,000, just more than half of the total U.S. sales for the band’s first album, 2001’s “Is This It.” And even Australian band Jet’s 2003 debut “Get Born,” with a tremendous amount of exposure from the use of the song “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” in Apple’s iPod advertising campaign, is at 865,000 copies now -- a good number, but not blockbuster level.

“The Hives has a superstar frontman, a great live show,” says Matt Smith, music director of KROQ. “The question is, do they have the hit song to get the sales numbers?”

Alan Light, editor of the rock magazine Tracks, believes that the best strategy for Interscope is to think not about short-term hits and sales, but about the band’s long-term prospects.

“What’s on their side is that they’re good on stage and can win people that way,” he says. “If Interscope has the patience, given the contract, then they could do well. There’s no shame in having a Hives on your roster, as long as you’re not building in an assumption that this is a platinum-selling act.”

So the band will continue its own mission to win converts.

“I just think it’s better for people to like us instead of other bands,” Almqvist says. “It’s healthier for everyone.”

It was no breeze getting Seals’ OK

Seals & CROFTS’ “Summer Breeze” recently reentered Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart a record-setting 31 years, eight months after last being on that list. Credit the gap to the Gap -- the retail chain whose TV commercials have featured the song and brought it back to public attention.

But it’s not exactly the original, which also hit No. 6 on the Billboard pop chart in 1972. The version being aired now has been remixed by Tsuper Tsunami, with a light electronic spin to the easygoing song. It’s one of 14 hits from the ‘70s drawn from the Warner Bros. Records archives that have been given new spins by various producers on “The Re:Mix Project,” a new album due Aug. 3.

The project, overseen by veteran producer and mixer Phillip Steir and partner Leah Simon, is intended to highlight the label’s legacy and reestablish its reputation as an artists’ haven. The first volume focuses mostly on the softer side of Warner’s ‘70s roster, with the Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music” (remixed by DJ Malibu), Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis” (Cuica), George Benson’s “This Masquerade” (Nightmare on Wax) and Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” (Halou) among the 14 tracks, while Steir tackled Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” and the one seeming misfit, Devo’s “Whip It.”

As it happened, Seals & Crofts were the most difficult to talk into authorizing a remix.

“They kept turning it down,” Steir says. “It was sacred to them, and they didn’t want it touched. But by coincidence, the Gap wanted the song and were going to have a cover version done. But they said to try remixing it. Once Jim Seals heard the remix, his mind changed. He said, ‘This is not what I imagined it would be.’ He said, ‘OK, you can put it on the record.’ ”