Local South Bay band Sense Field has endured its fair share of public and personal challenges, but in the end overcame hardships to release an album that some fans may think of as an emotional porthole into the life of one of its members in particular.

The emo-rock quartet overcame its first obstacle after signing with Warner Bros. Records in 1996. The band stagnated for five years in an attempt to record an album under the label and in the end never released a thing.

“It had been a five-year process in getting to the point of being signed by Warner Bros.,” recalled Sense Field’s guitarist and keyboardist, Chris Evenson. “Everybody thinks once you get there, you’re home and you can cruise and everything’s going to be fine. But it’s not like that at all. If you don’t produce and if nothing’s going on, combined with the number of bands that come through a label, they start looking at you a lot more critically and start making cuts. That’s what happened to us. We took too long in making a record and overthought things to the nth degree, and in the end they let us go. We learned a lot from the process like knowing that once you get a deal, you have to stay self-sufficient.”

Its next hurdle came shortly after signing with Nettwerk America Records in 2001 when the group’s former guitarist, Rodney Sellars, received a phone call while on the road. He was informed that his wife and young daughter had been involved in a tragic car accident, which had left his child paralyzed from the chin down. Sellars, who recorded and wrote practically all of the music on Sense Field’s debut album with Nettwork, decided to sit out of its latest project to focus on his family.

“The way we did it this time around was I wrote the music and then recorded them as demos on my own so the songs were pretty much together as far as the compositions go. Then Jon would take it from there and write the lyrics,” said Evenson. “In the past, Rodney was always the chief songwriter in the band, but he’s not working with us at the moment and he’d always been a major part of the process before. This time around it was different.

“Over the years we kind of relied on a lot of Rodney’s material since we all liked what he was writing. But with this record I had to get back into the mode of writing which I hadn’t been in for a couple of years. So it took a few songs before I felt like I was in the zone again.”

Sense Field’s most recent turnaround came in the form of its latest studio album entitled “Living Outside” (its second with Nettwerk following 2001’s “Tonight and Forever”), which served as a catharsis for singer Jon Bunch who finally faced his repressed memories in being the victim of molestation as a child.

“We’re the kind of band that always had so many songs and we wanted to put out records a lot more often, like every 18 months or so,” said Evenson. “So for us with our latest record it was one of the quickest turnarounds. It’s better to not sit on your stuff for too long because it can kind of get stale. So it was nice to whip up something relatively quickly. We were also the kind of band where in the past we tended to overthink everything we did. It was nice to get another one out there.”

Sense Field’s two other members are Rob Pfeiffer on drums and John Stockberger on bass. Evenson and Bunch have known each other since they were 15 and formed the band, which is more than a decade old, in high school.

Evenson, who grew up in Palos Verdes and later Redondo Beach, immersed himself in the local South Bay punk rock scene that has produced bands like Pennywise and Black Flag.

“We all grew up in the 1980s. We were all active in the punk rock scene back then and it was a pretty close-knit group of people,” said Evenson. “One thing the band has in common is that we all grew up listening to punk and going to shows in Southern California anywhere from Orange County to L.A. So we’ve all got that history and that one thing in common, although everybody has expanded their tastes over the years and we’re all kind of into different stuff now.”

Sense Field performs at the Troubadour Sept. 5.