Twin sisters Kim and Kelley Deal pass the phone back and forth like siblings accustomed to dividing everything. Today they're sharing an interview, and only the tone of their near-identical voices indicates who is on the line. Kelley's measured, Midwestern accent remains at a clipped, cordial distance, while Kim speaks with the casual slur of someone sprawled out on a sofa, catching up with friends after a long trip.

And let's welcome her back. With only three official albums and nearly a decade separating their last two releases, Kim's indie-rock outfit, The Breeders, has been a frustrating exercise in fame and misfortune, in platinum records and missed opportunities. They're back on track, however, playing Tokyo this week to promote 2002's "Title TK." Perhaps it's time to get reacquainted.

The Deal sisters first tasted show business playing at truck stops near their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. "Our claim to fame was, well, we were 17," recalls Kelley, "and we opened up for John Kay Steppenwolf."

Armed with an acoustic guitar and dual vocals, the girls' set list included original material peppered liberally with covers of Hank Williams and the Everly Brothers. "We pull in there," she says, "and there is a slew of motorcycles and bikers, and we were like, 'What the f**k are we doing here?', but it went really well, actually [laughs]. Bikers like that country stuff, I guess."

Soon they would be the headliners. Kim began playing bass for The Pixies, the seminal thrash-pop quartet. Off-kilter rhythms and slash-and-burn guitar techniques helped The Pixies accrue a sizable mainstream following (so much so that Kim was asked to consult a Broadway musical now in production based on The Pixies). Kim, however, was being increasingly pushed out of the songwriting process by lead singer Black Francis.

Co-founding The Breeders with Throwing Muses bassist, Tanya Donelly, provided a vent for Kim's creative frustration. Their puckish punk-pop utilized herky-jerky starts and stops, opaque lyrics and Kim's impishly childlike vocals. When Donelly left for a solo career, Kelley climbed aboard, creating an eerily alluring harmonic duo with her sister. They toured with grunge gods Nirvana and watched "Cannonball," their quirky, crossover single, further rupture the crumbling barrier dividing college radio and top-40 stations.

Then it all fell apart. Kelley was busted for heroin and put in rehab. Tour exhaustion and bickering dissolved the band, leaving Kim to participate in slapdash projects and pledge a new Breeders album for the next nine years. She made good on her promise last year, putting out "Title TK" with Kelley and members of Fear, the veteran Los Angeles punk outfit, as their backup band.

It wasn't easy, she says. When Kim returned to the studio in the late '90s, she found the analog recording equipment she favored had been replaced by the digital mixing program Pro Tools. "[Pro Tools] is just like a present on Christmas day," she explains. "They want to play with it until they get tired of it. You see, sound engineers love new toys," she moans with mock drama.

No matter what Kim said, no one would use stray from digital. Her voice becomes taut as she tells of house engineers sneaking behind her back to digitally embellish her recordings. One time she intentionally set a bass track a fraction off from the drum, only to have it line up on tape. It took her two days of re-recording to find out that the studio staff were looping her tracks on the computer when she wasn't looking. "I'm walking around for two days, saying 'What am I doing wrong?' " she's shouting now, "And I'm saying all this out loud, right? For two days! But no one says anything."

That little stunt sparked Kim's small crusade, dubbed the "All Wave" movement. Kim's coup was opposed to digital recording -- namely the use of Pro Tools, which she considers just an industry flavor of the month. "At that time I wasn't anti-digital," she says, "but I realized that there were people who were anti-analog. After that fiasco I was like 'F**k that Pro Tools. Turn that motherf**king thing off!' "

Does she campaign for the warmth of analog recording these days? Hardly. Fashion's fickle winds have now blown back to old-school methods, with scores of producers dusting off the recorders and stocking up on two-inch tape. "You know it's cheaper, faster and quicker to work on digital these days," she explains, "but [engineers] look at analog machines with different eyes now. It's new to them again."

While Kim was resisting the encroaching information age, her sister Kelley was fighting her own battles -- with addiction. She kept busy once out of rehab, forming her own band, the Kelley Deal 6000. "KD6000 had a lot of sober people in the band," she recalls, "That really helped." So were sober people migrating to the music? "No, not really," she chuckles, "KD6000 was not really about getting sober. It was more about drugs. [laughs]."

Kelley kept her plate full, starring in a low-budget horror flick with the late Joey Ramone and hair-metal heartthrob Sebastian Bach. She and Bach also brought together Smashing Pumpkin's Jimmy Chamberlin and Frogs' Jimmy Flemion to record an album as The Last Hard Men. Nowadays, she makes handbags to sell on the web and at gigs. "All the ones on the Web site [now] are sold. I have a whole slew of new ones that I need to take a picture of and get on my site."

Her problems with addiction continued to circulate in the music press long after she had cleaned out. "For a while, it was like, 'Jesus Christ, it's been five years,' " she says, "It's an old story, get over it." But then she relapsed on heroin. And then pain killers. She's almost two months now, clean and sober again, she relays optimistically, "But the narcotics are back in my mind again."

Rehab and sibling rivalry appear to be the most common queries put to Kelley. It gets old, she says. "[My sister and I] are like any relationship. Do you love them? Yeah. Do they make you insane sometimes? Yeah. You know, it's no different than that. There is nothing unique about it. It's just sisters. So that's really a non-story to me."

Both sisters find the present musical landscape a non-story, as well. "A lot of people have an opinion about the scene, but I don't see much of a change." says Kim, "Everybody's complaining about people like Britney [Spears] on the charts, but I remember Paula Abdul and all those people on the charts. The charts are always the last place you look for innovative, interesting challenging music."

This isn't a bad thing, though, she explains. "If people want to listen to the top 40, well, I mean, sometimes I put A-1 sauce on my steak. Some people think that's wrong and it's not wrong; I'm just not a gourmand."