It was late April, and Jason McGerr’s band, Death Cab for Cutie, was in a situation only a few bands face each year: a relatively young and credible group preparing to release one of the most anticipated albums of the year to fans, critics and record label executives, all with different, but equally towering, expectations.

A few years removed from being the next big thing, Death Cab stood on the precipice of being the next huge thing.

All I wanted to know was this: What does that feel like?

And all McGerr could think about was all the things he had to do before he left to play a show in London: Passport. Electronics adapters. Who’s going to watch over the studio and the house?

Not to mention phone interviews with reporters.

“I’m just going where they tell me to go and knowing that whatever I think is going to happen probably isn’t going to,” McGerr said. “It’s really exciting, but it’s a series of corners, and you can’t see a straightaway to save your life.”

Such is life in a band on the kind of meteoric rise Death Cab for Cutie, which will play Saturday in Bend (see “If you go”), has experienced in its 10-year existence. Formed in Bellingham, Wash., and now based in Seattle (though guitarist Chris Walla lives in Portland), the quartet released five excellent independent albums packed with distinctly Northwestern indie rock before jumping to a major label for 2005’s “Plans.”

Each record sold more than the one before it, as people took notice of frontman Ben Gibbard’s relentlessly catchy pop songs and sweetly sad-eyed lyrics about love, bitterness, and all the crap that happens in between. Along the way, Death Cab grew steadily from solo home-recording project to a band on the verge of superstardom.

Which brings us back to that precipice, from which Death Cab has since leapt with the release of its seventh album, “Narrow Stairs,” which debuted atop the Billboard 200 chart on Thursday with 144,000 copies sold.

The early narrative on the album was that it would showcase the band’s noisier side. In interviews, Walla called it “weird,” “creepy” and “polarizing.”

But aside from an atypical first single and some guitar feedback here and there, it sounds a lot like, well, Death Cab for Cutie. McGerr agrees.

“When you listen to a band’s entire catalog, you’re going to hear bits and pieces of both where they came from and where they’re headed,” he said. “Because you are that band and you … play the way that you play and you write the songs you write and you sing how you sing.”

He continued, tongue planted in cheek: “You read about bands that say, ‘Man, we isolated ourselves in Antarctica for 18 months and we all got naked and did crazy things and I don’t know how anyone’s going to digest this record.’ And then you … listen to it and you’re like, ‘Yup, sounds like your band, man.’ I think it’s really great as a group to set out to hit new heights and stretch and be adventurous because you’re never really going to steer that far off your course.”

That said, there is a jagged quality on “Narrow Stairs” that the underwhelming “Plans” lacked. McGerr says that came from recording with all four members playing at the same time, as opposed to tracking individually. As a result, “Stairs” is more reflective of the band’s live sound.

“This record has a little more grit (and) looser performances,” he said. “It’s not as careful and surgical as ‘Plans.’ It’s the same individuals, but we have bedhead and jeans and T-shirts on versus dressing up in suits for the last record.”

Whereas Gibbard, Walla and bassist Nick Harmer have been together since Death Cab’s early days in the late 1990s, McGerr joined the band in late 2002. And while he can’t say he knew he was joining a band that would be this big, he did recognize the potential.

“I knew they were good,” he said. “There was a confidence and a presence that reeked of staying power.”

Ironically, in an interview with The Oregonian earlier this month, Walla credited McGerr’s own calm confidence with steadying the band. “He’s so much the reason that we’re still a band at all,” Walla said. “It’s really great.”

And getting better all the time, McGerr said.

“I wouldn’t trade this for anything,” he said. “It just seems like with each tour we’re like, ‘God, I didn’t think it could get any better.’ Yet we seem to be able to find a way to make new discoveries.”

If you go

What: Death Cab for Cutie, The Decemberists, Mates of State

When: 6:30 p.m. Saturday, gates open 5 p.m.

Where: Les Schwab Amphitheater, 344 S.W. Shevlin Hixon Drive, Bend

Cost: $37 in advance, $41 day of show, plus service charges Advance tickets available at all TicketMaster outlets, including Joe’s (388-5595) and The Ticket Mill (318-5457) in Bend, as well as www.ticketmaster.com and 866-866-4502

Contact: 318-5457 or www.bendconcerts.com