You Won’t Find Them on the Fast Track : After 13 years of just cruising along, the ever-unpretentious punkers the Fastbacks are riding high on Seattle-mania.

Thanks to the rock world’s sudden interest in all bands from Washington, Seattle’s Fastbacks have finally been discovered after 13 years of playing.

Waiting patiently for notice, however, came easily to this group--one of the most unpretentious and least ambitious bands on the face of the planet. The most that bassist-singer Kim Warnick has ever made from a gig is $150. She doesn’t even own a bass cabinet, and bought her first amp only recently.

“I prefer to borrow other people’s, from the band that played before me,” she says. “That way I don’t have to lug it anywhere.”

Warnick and her bandmates, guitarists Kurt Bloch and Lulu Gargiulo, formed the Fastbacks in 1978 while still in high school. After a few months their friend Duff McKagan, who played guitar for two more popular punk outfits, offered to take over for then-drummer Bloch.

McKagan departed after a year and moved to L.A., where he wound up in a band called Guns N’ Roses. He left behind his bass for Warnick. The Fastbacks haven’t had a regular drummer since then, but have continued to thrive around their hometown.

“People made jokes about us because we were a dumb band and played bad and sang bad,” recalls Bloch. “But we always had fun and laughed and hung out. We just kept working at it at our own speed, and eventually we got better.”

Their 1982 song “In America,” a wistful musing on the foibles of living in the United States, became a minor punk classic and even earned some commercial airplay. The Fastbacks continued to release singles, plus another EP and another album, but with the recent rise of Seattle as a rock mecca, the Fastbacks--who play at Bogart’s in Long Beach on Thursday--have come into their own.

“People who were used to going out to see bad cover bands started going to clubs to see original bands that were more wild and idiotic,” notes Bloch. “We weren’t a part of that scene but we were friends with (those bands), and we’ve benefited by it. It’s hard for people not to notice that every band they hear on the radio now was playing just last year at the Off Ramp, and so people think, ‘Maybe there are some other good bands around here!’ ”

Recent CD reissues of the Fastbacks’ recordings on the PopLlama label, and last year’s singles compilation “The Question Is No” on Sub Pop, have led to belated accolades as critics discovered the band’s unalloyed pop-punk charm.

When the band’s new album on Sub Pop, “Zucker,” comes out next month, it will be the first Fastbacks record ever released within a year of recording. But the band itself remains somewhat bemused by the attention, and as unambitious as ever.

“We’re probably the only band in Seattle which has never been approached by a major label,” says Bloch. “We’ve never even been asked for a tape or taken out to dinner.

“But that’s OK, because we’ve never been very goal-oriented. On the other hand, people think we’re just hobbyists, and that’s not true either. If it was we’d have broken up 10 years ago.”

“The other day,” adds Warnick, “Lulu said, ‘Kim, don’t you sometimes just hate the Fastbacks?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, Lulu, sometimes I do.’

“But I still love to play live and maybe open for one of my heroes, or go to California for a week’s tour. If we’d ever tried to get signed, we’d be old and useless and bitter by now. Things have worked out so much better for us by not even trying. . . . There’s still so much left to do.”