With little ambition for the limelight and no one to please but themselves, Dr. Dog has quietly become America’s next great band.

It’s shoulder to shoulder in the small Hollywood club Hotel Café, a spot best known as a way station for singer/songwriters like Sarah Bareilles and Kate Nash on their way to the top of the buzz heap. Inside, though, the band onstage has already caught its break: While Dr. Dog plays, a major-label head is sipping an expense account Heinekin while standing next to a young manager whose mission is to slip his band’s EP to the guys that are playing. The musicians, though, are oblivious: They’re embedded in a harmonic caterwaul that ends with slim, pale, sunglass-and-knit-capped singer Scott McMicken doing a herky-jerky version of the running man—then stomping a honky-tonk piano lick with his feet.

He steps to the mic: “Every time we play L.A., I feel weird.”

McMicken’s not talking about the people in the crowd—by now, he’s used to hobnobbing with both suits and other musicians. For the past five years, his band’s been on the long road to semi-success, touring with groups like The Raconteurs and impressing high-level fans such as Beck, who recently issued a remix of one of Dr. Dog’s songs. He’s certainly not talking about the club—though nestled in the sceniest part of Los Angeles, the Hotel Café oozes sincerity, the low-slug ceiling, simple wooden pub chairs and back alley entrance more speakeasy than lounge.

No, what McMicken—one of two frontmen for the genre-bending, Philly-based pop/rock/psych/whatever band—is talking about is…