After years of hard work, you have an enormous breakthrough. You achieve radio stardom. You get spotted by Timbaland. You sell nearly two million copies of your debut album. Your co-founder is also an in-demand song writer and record producer.

If you’re OneRepublic, all of the above describes you. Your debut album, Dreaming Out Loud, sold nearly two million copies to date, your song “Apologize” has sold five million copies worldwide. Your frontman Ryan Tedder has written and produced singles with a boldfaced list of musicians including Leona Lewis, Beyonce, Hilary Duff, Bubba Sparxxx, Clay Aiken, Jennifer Hudson, Natasha Bedingfield, Whitney Houston, Esmee Denters, Chris Cornell, Rihanna, and Daughtry, to name a few.

And yet, as OneRepublic releases its sophomore set, Waking Up, the whispers are still there. Reviews for the first album were mixed. Some accused the band of sounding too much like a less-talented version of Coldplay – a band with whom Tedder has said OneRepublic was not very familiar when it made its first album. Others claimed that the rest of the debut wasn’t nearly as good as “Apologize” was.

Confident in his talents, Tedder admitted during a recent interview with The Huffington Post that there was a need to move away and not make “Apologize Part 2.” He recognized that the first album was “a bit homogenius [sic].” Accordingly, the band made the effort to make the new album more energetic. Quite simply, OneRepublic wanted people to dance and if you listen to the new album, that focus is clear.

At the same time, one wonders whether the band can expand upon this sound and continue to grow or whether OneRepublic has reached the limits of its talents. Though it seems like the latter is the case, when you have a producer/songwriter as capable as Tedder is in your arsenal, you might just have a future after all.