In a different genre, in a different era, with a different band, it might have seemed like a sellout. The year was 1995, and a halfway successful bluegrass group named the Dixie Chicks had gotten a new lead singer (Natalie Maines), a new record label (Sony) and a new sound (old fans called it pop).

This was a canny, commercially minded reinvention, but somehow they made it sound like an act of liberation. With Maines belting out the leads and two bandmates — fiddler Martie Maguire and her banjo-playing sister Emily Robison — adding tight harmonies, the Dixie Chicks were finally free to make the exuberant blockbusters they had always dreamed of. On a pair of near-perfect albums, 1998’s Wide Open Spaces and 1999’s Fly, the band created a high-spirited hybrid, full of bluegrass licks, girl-group harmonies and defiant plotlines. (In “Let ’Er Rip,” a lousy man gets a pink slip; in “Goodbye Earl,” an abusive one gets Eminem’d — stuffed in a trunk and dumped in a lake.) Combined, the albums have sold more than 28 million copies in America.

But by 2002, the Dixie Chicks were feeling nostalgic for the older-fashioned group they used to be, which meant — O, brother! — that it was time for an old-fashioned album, complete with sepia-toned photographs and lots of mandolin. Home was a handsome, sometimes gorgeous album, but it wasn’t exactly fun. And it hinted at the growing tension between the three Chicks and the control freaks who run Nashville: Maines was taking aim at country radio’s distaste for history when she sang, “They got money but they don’t have Cash.”

What happened next only intensified this rift. Maines declared herself “ashamed” to share Texas with President Bush, and the world-class pot-stirrer Toby Keith took exception. Much of the country-music world took Keith’s side: There were protests, boycotts, radio-station blacklists. The Dixie Chicks felt abandoned by the only genre they’d ever known.

On their new album, Taking the Long Way, they sound angry but resigned; they’re outcasts now, and proud of it. On the first single, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” written by the band and Dan Wilson, Maines sings, “Forgive, sounds good/Forget, I’m not sure I could.”

This album has some of what was missing from Home: fire, ugliness, resentment. “Not Ready to Make Nice” works not because Maines sounds righteous but because she sounds bitter: “It’s too late to make it right/I probably wouldn’t if I could,” she sings; this isn’t about Bush, it’s about pride. In “Lubbock or Leave It,” co-written by Mike Campbell (from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers), she pays seething tribute to her hometown. Addressing herself to the ghost of Buddy Holly, a fellow Lubbockite, Maines sings, “I hear they hate me now, just like they hated you/Maybe when I’m dead and gone I’ll get a statue too.”

The old giddiness is mainly gone, probably for good. The album was produced by Rick Rubin, who has steered the group toward big ballads and mellow country-rock, and the results are mostly successful. Gary Louris (from the Jayhawks) and Pete Yorn helped write “Baby Hold On,” which slowly reveals itself to be a full-on power ballad. And if “Favorite Year,” co-written by Sheryl Crow, kind of sounds like a Sheryl Crow song (what, she thinks we don’t remember “My Favorite Mistake”?) — well, at least it sounds like a good one.

There are a few duds, like “So Hard,” an anguished song about a woman having trouble getting pregnant. But while this album, like Home, is a self-consciously grown-up album, it’s not backward-looking. Two of the best songs are the quietest. “Easy Silence” is a mellow tribute to a mellow lover. And the hypnotic “Lullaby” could be sung to a man or to a baby: The three murmur, “How long do you wanna be loved/Is forever enough?” Kicked out of the country-music nest, the Dixie Chicks don’t sound as if they’re leaving — or going — home. They sound as if they’re making a new one.

Download: “Lullaby,” “Not Ready to Make Nice”