After spending an awfully long time on tour after the release of its 2003 album “Make Yourself Sick,” the band Boys Night Out learned something.

“It was an awakening to see what’s out there,” said Boys Night Out guitarist Jeff Davis. “We saw that we were part of an endless stream of bands doing this.”

Boys Night Out and the bands like it were at the time giving shape to the emo sound, letting punk rock and hard-rock elements collide on the highway of broken-hearted introspection. What seemed distinct in Boys Night Out’s Ontario home seemed all-too-common by the time the band landed on the 2004 Warped Tour.

“We ended that tour saying if we’re going to do this, let’s really apply ourselves here,” Davis said. “We went into writing the new record with the frame of mind of making changes.”

And all the changes were for the better. Boys Night Out broke from the pack with “Trainwreck,” its second album for Ferret Records, leaving behind the conventions of the emo scene for music that reaches into pop, prog-rock and heavy metal to good effect.

And like The Who did with “Tommy” and Green Day did with “American Idiot,” Boys Night Out got its bearings by writing an album based on a story. In the case of “Train-wreck,” Davis turned to a tale he had written years earlier about a serial killer. Boys Night Out singer Connor Lovat-Fraser penned the lyrics, and he and Davis broke down the tale of madness and murder into 12 musically diverse tracks.

Boys Night Out avoided the pitfalls that a concept album can present (plodding, forced songs) by conjuring some stark and strange moments of contrast.

“The lyrics are moody and depressing and dark as hell. But the hooks are there. The idea is to get people to sing along to this story of a serial killer following home his victim,” Davis said.

The other idea was to have people listen to “Train-wreck” as a whole piece of music, and not succumb to the iPod-stoked urge to simply download a couple of tracks to tuck into a shuffle mode playlist.

“It was cool working with (producer) Machine. He came up to hear us jam and it clicked. The idea was to make a full album, one that kids would listen to front to back, read the lyrics and check out the artwork,” Davis said.

Such projects are not new to Machine, who has worked on records by King Crimson and Lamb of God

Boys Night Out set the mood with an opening monologue delivered by a doctor analyzing his catatonic patient, knowing that something lurks behind the vacant eyes he is studying. The song cycle details the protagonist’s lapse into dementia, murderous impulses, eventual medicated confinement and reawakened urge to kill again once given the chance. It’s not a happy story.

But it is interesting to listen to, as Boys Night Out shows fresh ideas, such as the spacey parts heard on “Relapsing,” and the sardonic yet chipper sounding “Medicating.”

“We knew we were overstepping our bounds as a band,” Davis said. “But still, it’s not a droning Pink Floyd record.”

To avoid the drone, the band simply kept to its own interests. Fortunately, Davis, Lovat-Fraser, guitarist Andy Lewis, bass player Dave Costa, and newest “boy” keyboard player Kara Dupuy like a lot of different kinds of music.

“There is vast musical taste within the band. The trick was to amalgamate it all. There are points where the lyrics are some of our darkest, but we’ll throw in some hand-clapping. And there are parts when the music is dirtier and heavier than anything we’ve done before,” Davis said.

The shifts and concepts caught fans off guard, and Davis said Boys Night Out had to scale back the number of tunes it was playing off the new record when it returned to touring.

“Every night we have to play the songs kids like off of ‘Make Yourself Sick,’ and that’s fair. If I saw my favorite band, and all the material they played was new, I’d get bummed, too,” Davis said.

Boys Night Out is on a new round of North American shows with a concert scheduled for Saturday night at The Palladium, 261 Main St., Worcester. Anterrabae, Drive By and Just Surrender are also on the bill, and Boys Night Out is advertising the shows as consisting of material from its two full-length albums and debut EP, “Broken Bones and Bloody Kisses.”

Davis said he doubts that Boys Night Out will again crank out a concept album. But as he and the rest of the band think about their next album, Davis said Boys Night Out, as it did on its first big bout of touring, learned something from the sophomore album experience.

“The new record will probably have a consistent theme,” he said. “But not a continuous story.”

Scott McLennan can be reached at tgmusic1@yahoo.com