Two years ago, it looked like Aimee Echo had finally bedded her dream of becoming a rock star. After years of slugging it out in clubs and living through a failed metal band (Human Waste Project), her new group, The Start, had just released their debut, Shakedown. Critics gushed over the band’s ’80s flashback. The group’s single, “Gorgeous”—basically Blondie gone SoCal—had sneaked its way onto MTV2 and college radio. Alternative Press named the album one of the best of the year. Opening slots on tours with the likes of Weezer and Incubus were scoring the quartet mucho exposure. Everything had finally stacked up right for Echo.

And then it all just vanished. The band’s backer, an Interscope Records subsidiary called The Label, imploded and dumped its entire roster. In one quick business move, Echo’s dream popped like a cheerleader’s gum right as it was all coming into focus. She was pissed—storm-the-board-meeting pissed.

The anger ultimately saved her. She could have just rolled over and taken a bank-teller job or turned into Annie Potts in Pretty in Pink. Instead, she got motivated. She bought a van and a trailer. She hit the road like a wronged trucker looking for revenge.

“We just decided not to give up,” Echo says. “We did what we know to do, which is make music and go on tour. Not a lot of people expected that. A lot of bands when they lose their outside support lay down and die, but we just kept going.”

Echo’s favorite photo from one of the group’s recent tours, a jaunt earlier this year with the Alkaline Trio, has her and guitarist Jamie Miller on their backs at 3 a.m. in a parking lot. Both are stuffed under the van trying to figure out how to fix the suspension. “It’s moments like that when you realize, ‘Wow, this is really what it’s all about,’” she says. “When you’re working for yourself you’ll do anything to make it happen.”

And now, after two years of struggling for every fan, things are finally starting to happen for The Start—again. The group’s new self-titled and self-financed EP has been picked up by the tiny indie Small Stone. The band scored a slot on the first Girlz Garage Tour, a package put together by Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman. And The Start just inked a deal with punk stalwart Nitro Records, with plans for a new full-length in the spring.

“It’s absolutely satisfying,” Echo says with pride. “No one can take what we’ve accomplished away from us. I probably worked harder in the last year and a half than I have in my entire life. But no matter how hard it got, I could always just dig down and do it. And there was always something worse. But I learned that no matter what, nothing can knock me down. And now we did this.”

In a way, it’s surprising things didn’t happen sooner. With groups like The Faint, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Hot Hot Heat mining new-wave nostalgia, it would have been natural for The Start, a group that beat everyone else out of the blocks, to be managing the dig. Shakedown played like a steroid-enhanced John Hughes soundtrack, complete with gurgling synth lines and Echo’s best Siouxsie Sioux posturing. A song like “Communion” easily could have been a discarded Depeche Mode hit if it weren’t for the occasional slabs of distorted thunder. And the band’s EP is stuffed with more than enough bouncing beats and trashy riffs to make Molly Ringwald dance all funny.

But strangely, the new-wave tag seemed to be more of a hindrance than help for The Start. “It worked for those other bands, and it’s making a big impact for them. But for us, the tag seemed to drag us down. It just all depends on people’s definition of ‘new wave.’ If people think A-Ha rather than Blondie, we’re in trouble. And sometimes that’s the case.”