2000s indie pop group Rilo Kiley plans to debut a 16-track rarities collection featuring seven previously unreleased songs and stimulating plenty of nostalgia.

Throughout my time growing up as a kid desperately trying to find his place on the fringes of the indie scene, Rilo Kiley was always one of those bands that was just there, hanging out in the background of The O.C. episodes and adorning posters in the bedrooms of all the cool hipster girls. Jenny Lewis and company made indie pop that sounded like most other mid-2000s pop; her solo work was folksy and approachable, but as a teenager, I never thought it seemed particularly revolutionary or vital.

Then I turned 20, and everything changed. That’s when Rilo Kiley started making sense: Throughout its decade-long run, the band was always fascinated with transitions and evolution. What makes darkness turn to light? What distinguishes crazy from healthy? Why does teenage angst inevitably just fade into adult despair?

And most importantly, what can we do about it?

That’s why it’s so appropriate that RKives, a new collection of B-sides and unreleased rarities from the beloved 2000s group, is being released now, just as the doldrums of winter begin to fade into spring. This is a time of change, the time of the year that cries out for Jenny Lewis’ plaintive coo and jangly guitars. The frost is melting, the rain is coming and the sun could burst out at any time.

Lyrically and musically, Rilo Kiley was always growing, always advancing by leaps and bounds. The slick radio pop of Under the Blacklight, the group’s most recent album, is a far cry from the cute-girl-with-a-guitar shtick of its debut, Take Offs and Landings.

Both albums have musical merit, but they deliberately speak to wildly different times of life; Take Offs and Landings is the sound of a wordy, too-smart-for-her-own-good teenager trying — and, more often than not, failing — to find her place in the world.

“How do you do it? And make it seem effortless?” Lewis pleads on “Plane Crash in C,” before a waltzing horn section sweeps in to take the melody — and the pressure — away. “I have no idea what’s been going on lately,” Lewis concludes, and it’s at once a sincere cry for help and a tongue-in-cheek act of defiance from a girl caught between the pangs of adolescence and the even worse pangs of adulthood.

Contrast this with, say, “Silver Linings,” from Under the Blacklight. Lewis’ earnest questioning is gone, replaced with a worn-out, soulful croon. “Hooray, hooray, I’m your silver lining,” she sings slowly, lazily. It’s impossible to tell what’s serious and what’s sarcastic. What’s clear is that Lewis is no longer the fresh-faced girl trying to make a difference. Trying doesn’t matter anymore. Cynicism has taken its toll. The girl who was eager to please is now a woman who’s seen it all.

Rilo Kiley was a group of lost, directionless kids making music about being lost, directionless kids. And the band nailed it. That’s why the lyrics that just seemed like clever nonsense as a kid now feel so poignant as an ostensible young adult: I now know what it’s like to move away from home, to get too into alcohol and cigarettes, to “get a real job” and to realize that “there’s no mystery left” (as Lewis does in “Portions for Foxes”), but hope for the best nonetheless.