Athens-based duo pacificUV’s work has been drooled over by everyone from Spin to Pitchfork to NPR, even garnering the honor of “masterpiece” from Rolling Stone, but no one could blame you if you still hadn’t heard of them. In these days of Internet-fueled frenzied hype and turn-and-burn releases, the dreampoppers’ pace of three albums in eight years has made them easy to miss. This is not lost on frontman and primary songwriter Clay Jordan.

“I think with the first two records, I tended to be more of a slow person,” he says. “Some people like stimulants and some people like depressants, and I’m certainly a depressants person—if that’s an analogy for personality.”

This sentiment is reflected beautifully on pacificUV’s latest release, Weekends, a fuzzy musing on the end of a relationship filtered through the experience of self-medicating on those lonely Friday and Saturday nights when, as Jordan says, "you have free time and you're more introspective and you're more alone."

What the band lacks in prolific output it consistently makes up for in thoughtfulness and quality. Weekends offers up chewy themes of loss and cognitive dissonance made accessible by a patina of pop sensibility provided by co-writer, bassist and knob-fiddler Suny Lyons.

“Initially, my contribution to pacificUV was the studio,” Lyons says. “Clay had a bunch of songs that he’d started writing when he moved back from Portland, and he booked a bunch of studio time to work on them.”

That collaboration in the studio soon began to grow, with Lyons contributing by playing more and more instruments on the record and soon, doing some of the songwriting as well.

“Maybe a really good example is the song that’s sort of like our single: ‘Funny Girl,’” says Lyons. “That was one of the first songs that we really co-wrote, that I ended up singing. It’s basically about being in love with someone who’s hopelessly and fatally aloof and blasé, and the state of feeling unable to change the way that you’re in love with that person. Clay and I each had our own experiences with that to bring to the story, so we started writing that song together.”

Lyons leaves his fingerprint on the record in other ways as well—such as the existential quandary “I’m Here (But It’s Not Me)” and the touches of '70s and '80s pop in his ode to My Bloody Valentine: “Be My Only Shallow Love”—but the bulk of the songwriting and the overarching theme are decidedly Jordan’s.

“I do [see this record as a concept album] to a certain degree," says Jordan. "I like the idea of suggesting a narrative and then having the audience fill in the blanks."

While Weekends is indeed a mournful record, it’s not so melancholy as to be reserved for sad-day playlists or shelved until you need a good cry after a break-up. This is thanks in part to the vein of warm electropop that runs through it and in part to Jordan’s shift toward a more optimistic perspective.

“I think I’m moving more toward the stimulants side, in terms of more upbeat music,” Jordan confides. “So, whatever, if this record’s average is 80 bpm, the next record’s like 100 or 120 bpm.”

Also changing for pacificUV is the slow pace of the band’s output. Lyons and Jordan are already working on a new album which they hope to release by this time next year, and they’re planning to tour more extensively to support this record than they have done for any of their previous releases. They’re also managing, along with a small group of fellow musicians, a new record label called Mazarine (which released Weekends), a nonprofit they hope will empower musicians to make more money from their projects, rather than frittering it away on middle men.

“We want to have this group of people who are all on the same page about quality of work and quantity of work and trying to create something that’s special,” says Lyons.

With a fresh wave of warm praise for their latest record, a label that supports the interests of its docket of artists, and Jordan’s newfound “stimulant personality,” pacificUV seems poised at last to reach the level of success and notoriety their work and its attending press have long suggested they deserve.

WHO: pacificUV (CD release show), Electrophoria, powerkompany

WHERE: 40 Watt Club

WHEN: Friday, Feb. 24, 9 p.m.

HOW MUCH: $5 (21+), $7 (18+)