Courtney Love claimed not to know what a lot of the lyrics on Hole's eagerly awaited third album, Celebrity Skin (Sept. 8), meant.

Either that, or the singer/songwriter for the Los Angeles-based rock band just wasn't talking about an album that is as provocative and suggestive as any she has written, full of melodically heavy tunes that seem to reflect on the artist's controversial and tragic past.

But one line she was willing to dissect told some of the Hole story, as it were, and, in that same way, the story of their soon-to-be-released album. "Hey, there's only us left now," Love belts during the chorus to the album's title track (RealAudio excerpt), a trashy bit of glam-pop anchored by guitarist Eric Erlandson's crunching barre chords.

"I was at a club in New York and [Jon] Spencer [Blues Explosion] was playing," Love said last month in Los Angeles, reflecting on the lyric. "I looked around and I saw all our peers from when we started. So many of them were back at their day job or doing the German circuit or bitter.

"A lot of the reasons that they were bitter was maybe because they'd been overtaken by irony, they'd been conflicted about selling out and what that means."

Selling out is a theme of sorts on the powerful, pop-inflected 12-song album. How not to sell out, what to do once you have sold out, how it feels to sell out.

At the center of it all is Love, who sloughs off some of the rough, pointed edges of the previous Hole album, Live Through This, in favor of a more melodic, highly produced sound. It's an approach that owes as much to pop-wise '70s rock groups like the Runaways as it does to the more abrasive sound of the riot-grrrl phenomenon that Love helped spearhead in the early '90s.

The result is a collection that swings from the updated girl-group grind of "Hit So Hard" (one of five songs the group co-wrote with Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan) to the fuzzed-out, slow-motion landslide of "Use Once & Destroy."

Most surprising -- given Erlandson's description of Love's vocals on Live Through This as "melodic screaming" -- is the more traditionally pop phrasing the singer employs on this album. Not that Love has embarked on any pop-singer trip a la Celine Dion, since, as Erlandson eagerly added, "This record is more pop singing, without the screaming. But it's still us -- it's still her singing."

Though it's been four years since Hole's last record, this album took half that time to prepare, according to Love and Erlandson; nearly one year to write and another to record. During that time, Love also drew raves for her portrayal of the drug-addicted Althea Flynt in the 1996 film "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and got her fractured personal life in order following the April 1994 suicide of her husband, ex-Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain.

"Some intense personal habits had to be dealt with that had to do with health and mental capacity," Love said of the years since Live Through This was released in 1994. "Some intense stuff that happened to my life."

"We took the time that we needed to grow and took our time writing, instead of writing on the road, hopping in the studio like a lot of bands do and releasing a really sub-level record," Erlandson explained. (The album also features bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur and former drummer Patty Schemel.)

She may not be willing to interpret them, but Love's crash-and-burn lyrics are full of provocative, self-referential phrases that might harbor double or triple meanings.

"There's also the line of restraint, exploitation and subtext," Love said of dealing explicitly with such difficult topics as Cobain's death. "What do you wanna restrain? What do you wanna hold back? What do you wanna say? And when I found myself striking lines because they were too much, I really was a little bit torn. Am I censoring, or am I exploiting? I'm not going to exploit. So this isn't censoring."

Yet Love wrote "Reasons To Be Beautiful," which features the line "It's better to rise than fade away" -- seemingly a reference to a lyric from a Neil Young song that Cobain quoted in his suicide note. The Hole track also cleverly uses a play on Love's own name in such lines as "Love hangs herself/ with the bedsheets in her cell" and "Love hates you/ I lived my life in ruins for you."

While writing such songs, Love said, she took to heart a quote from folk legend Bob Dylan, who supposedly informed a rock journalist, "I'm not gonna tell you everything. But what I do choose to tell you is better than the guy across the street."

It's on the Celebrity Skin songs "Hit So Hard" and "Use Once & Destroy" that Love's writing reaches its zenith.

The dreamy, sluggish "Hit So Hard" is in the vein of the Hole B-side cover of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)," originally recorded by the '60s girl group the Crystals. In the new song, Love acerbically "glamorizes" domestic abuse with the refrain "He hit so hard/ I saw stars/ He hit so hard/ I saw God."

Equally graphic and disturbing, "Use Once" features the lines "I went down for the remains/ sort through all your blurs and stains" and "all dressed in red, always the bride/ Off with her head, all dressed in white." Conversely, the breezy acoustic pop of "Malibu" and "Heaven Tonight" glows with the sunshiny studio sheen of mid-'70s California rock.

"That's the goal," Love said of the juxtapositions. "I wanted to marry great hooks with a dense vision ... I want to be as perverse as I'd like to be -- and, therefore, subversive -- while making you hum along with it."

The full track-listing for Celebrity Skin is: "Celebrity Skin," "Awful," "Hit So Hard," "Malibu," "Reasons To Be Beautiful," "Dying," "Use Once & Destroy," "Northern Star," "Boys on the Radio," "Heaven Tonight," "Playing Your Song" and "Petals."