Nobody tells a story like Kurt Wagner, but then again, who would try to? In “The New World Wave,” a stunner from Lambchop’s new album Punching the Clown, the 66-year-old songwriter spins a generation-spanning yarn that touches on surviving the Great Depression, the patient assemblage of chosen family, and the way unattended dreams can crumble into sellable assets. It’s heavy stuff, but consider how he pulls it off: For a line or two, he gets hung up on a sticky metaphor about hot dogs; he tugs at the heartstrings with a blink-and-you-miss-it pun around the word “apparent”; just after, he breaks the fourth wall (“Wow, it just got moody”) and, thus, immediately kills the mood; approaching the climax alongside a choir, he grumbles the word “goddammit” so convincingly you’d think he forgot the tape was rolling. And who exactly is Easy Buckets, the character at the heart of the action? Well, maybe you just had to be there.

Even when it seems like he’s rambling, Wagner, like few working songwriters, has made an art of following his muse. Forty years into his career leading Lambchop, it’s easy to assume the sound of their records will always change: Are they the jumpiest alt-country band, the most soulful slowcore group, or a psychedelic lounge act? A chamber-folk collective with a horn section? Or a laptop-pop project with a guy muttering through Auto-Tune? Yes, all of the above. But as their sound has evolved and expanded, Wagner’s lyrics have remained omnivorous and uncontainable, quotable and profound but proudly unsentimental. “The New World Wave” may not tell a straight story, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t leave you hanging on every word.

Part of its success is because, once again, Lambchop have reinvented themselves. On one hand, you can call it a return to form: They’re back to folk instruments, and, after several albums of electronic experimentation, no effects obscure Wagner’s vocals. Still, they’ve never sounded quite like this. Working with producer Ryan Olson at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin, Wagner is accompanied on each track by co-writer Andrew Broder on acoustic guitar and Vernon on banjo. The percussion is sparse and unconventional and fleeting: castanets in “Weakened”; what sounds like breaking glass to punctuate “The New World Wave.” Most notably, Wagner sings alongside the London Choir and the Eau Claires Vocal Sextet, who provide lined-out harmonies that give these songs the feelings of country-gospel hymnals, even when the lyrics involve words like “Dumbotron” and exclamations like “What the fuck?”

The effect is distinct in Lambchop’s catalog: intimate, uncanny, beautiful. The title track builds and swells around an autumnal guitar lick, while “Afterburner” tiptoes in with a trilling solo that suggests a gondola ride. Occasionally, Lambchop break the spell: A DJ drop declaring “LAMBCHOP, NEW SHIT” in the opening “Just West of Nicolett” marks their latest in a career of attention-grabbing introductions, and a rare echo effect in “Cigar” sends its closing moments into dubby territory. But for the most part, Punching the Clown suggests Wagner has spent the last few years searching for the right setting for these songs, only to discover it in their simplest, most intuitive forms. “To Do,” a heartfelt country song that doubles as a bucket-list lament, arrives with the bleak austerity of Rick Rubin-era Johnny Cash: “Before I get to heaven,” Wagner tells us, “I need to water the plants.”

This lyric is representative of his tone—urgent and bittersweet, homebound with an eye to the stars—and Wagner often narrates in a kind of haze. The voices are feverish, pleading, searching, all delivered in his characteristic warbles and wails, croaks and mumbles. On Lambchop’s last album, 2022’s The Bible, Wagner described the emotional toll of tending to his ailing, elderly father: “It should get easier with time,” he cried, sensing that just the opposite was true. Now, his portraits of death and decay have no counterbalance. The gorgeous “Weakened” focuses entirely on a sick person swaddled in bed, “like a Buddha in a blanket,” and concludes its first chorus with the choir singing, “I’m a-ready.”

Each of these transmissions—from the life flashing before your eyes in “The New World Wave” to the “America on mute” political fugue in “Afterburner”—feels designed to raise just as many questions as it answers. And like any of Lambchop’s great albums, it can send you down some rabbit holes. What does “White “People,” for example, have to do with Allen Toussaint’s “Night People,” with which it shares a winking lyrical resemblance? You could hear it as parody, but then Wagner lends it the most forceful, desperate vocal delivery of the record, bellowing the words as if warning the neighbors of an oncoming storm. He’s funny until he’s not—following a “We’re so broke, we can’t even pay attention” joke with a genuinely concerned “My god…”—and even then, it’s kinda funny.

Seeing it cited as a source of inspiration, I watched the 2009 movie Punching the Clown, which centers on the trials and tribulations of a comedian-musician making his way to Los Angeles. From the film’s depiction of the constant humiliation of the entertainment industry—a kind of Inside Llewyn Davis for the 2000s indie world—I imagined its title as a metaphor for the relationship between aspiring artists and their fickle audience. When the phrase shows up in the script, it turns out it’s a euphemism for masturbating. Go figure.

And yet, both interpretations seem useful in the world of Lambchop. At this point in their arc, they’ve had their share of critical acclaim—Nixon, in 2000, was named Uncut’s Album of the Year over Kid A—and waves of attention. It’s hard to imagine any of today’s country-leaning indie songwriters without their blueprint, especially ones like MJ Lenderman and Friendship’s Dan Wriggins, who can sound earnest and absurd, cosmic and cloistered, deadly serious and hilariously dumb, all in the same couplet. And unlike a lot of songwriters from his own generation, Wagner still maintains a sense of unpredictability in his art, a challenge to uncover new layers with each new song, to never retread familiar ground—which also means never taking his own legacy too seriously. So while Punching the Clown is the most mysterious and disquieting album in Lambchop’s discography, there’s a triumph in it also being their most emotionally direct. Despite all its tangents and misdirection, conspicuous interruptions and tearful last words, Wagner sounds like he’s finally getting to the heart of the matter.