The Mavericks are back on stage

If all you know about The Mavericks comes via the band’s highest-charting single, “All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down,” with accordionist Flaco Jimenez, or maybe the band’s penchant for covering “Volver, Volver” live in concert, you’ve got a lot to learn.

Luckily, now might not be a bad time to discover, or rediscover the band, as after some time off the radar, they have returned with a new disc of material (“In Time”), and are playing shows that seem to show them back to their playful live form.

For a roughly 10-year span, beginning in the early 1990s, The Mavericks were sort of treated as a nouveau Los Lobos — mixing traditional Latino music with a sort of new rock edge, enough to keep indie kids mildly interested while even giving country music lovers a scrap to gnaw on.

At the center stood leader Raul Malo, the band’s burly Cuban frontman whose buttery, Roy Orbison-like warble, was a perfect framework for the band’s left-of-center approach. Then, in a story that’s played out every day in music, Malo split from the band — not permanently, he said at the time — to test the solo music waters.

Touring had taken its toll, as did the always-intense scrutiny that comes along with success in the music business.

“When the last Mavericks incarnation ended, that was it for me,” drummer Paul Deakin said recently. “When you’re on that hamster wheel a lot, it doesn’t become fun as much. You become a cover band of yourselves, and it’s a grind.”

Today, Malo jokes about the temporary split (“We’ve never been away!” he said to a fan recently), but makes no jokes when it comes to explaining why the time seemed right for a Mavericks reunion, if one prefers to use that term.

“My grandfather had a proper lunch with coffee every day, and he was a butcher by trade,” Malo said “He wanted to savor his life. That’s what this music is. It’s why we decided to do this again.”

On “In Time,” the band runs down many of the avenues it has before, and with the original lineup intact, Malo reports that the cohesion within the group is at an all-time high.

And at its center, the Mavericks still lean on what buttered their bread early on.

“Certainly there’s a lot of Latin music in there,” Malo said of the songs on “In Time.” “There’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Sergio Mendes, the Gypsy Kings … but there’s also Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and a dose of Buck Owens for good measure.”