The new Fleshtones got released yesterday, and nothing’s gonna bring me down.

I first saw the band 30 years ago, and have sought them out over 50 times since, yet I still consider myself a latecomer to their awe-striking power-stanced superock. That’s because they’d already been signed to IRS, released an EP and a full-length, and were touring with The Police by the time I was first able to see them, at the Orpheum Theater in Boston in 1980. They’d already made it. I’d missed whole chapters in their existence. Luckily (for me, if not them), the ups and downs since that early burst of notoriety have kept avid fans guessing and gushing. This has never been a band you can convince yourself to give up on because they’ve “sold out.”

After perfecting the old-school basement-party aspect of their persona on umpteen earlier albums, Brooklyn Sound Solution marks a new phase of Fleshtone. It’s less cocky, more artful, less chaotic, more crafted.

Like The Ramones before them, The Fleshtones have allied themselves with a host of well-known producers over the years, all of whom may well have proclaimed themselves to be devout fans of the bands but not all of whom have brought the necessary skills to the task of capturing them on record.

Lenny Kaye—the revered Nuggets compiler, pop music historian and Patti Smith bandmate—turns out to be an inspired overseer, even while taking the Fleshtones in what might be seen as a new direction. He highlights two tones of Fleshtones which often get short shrift on disc: their heritage and their musicianship.

The instrumental groove on “Solution #1”—the rock equivalent of an Edgar Kennedy silent movie slow burn—sends the same shivers up your spine that you used to only get at Fleshtones live shows. That’s a much finer accomplishment than replicating yet another of guitarist Keith Streng’s hyena-scream anthems, though Kaye shows that he can do that too, on “You Give Me Nothing to Go On.” In both cases, it’s great to have the garage R&B jams that are so much a part of Fleshtones live recordings flare up so strongly in their studio work as well.

In fact, there are so many long intros, drawn-out fades and held-back vocals that Brooklyn Sound Solution could be accused of starting a new genre of ambient rock. The songs are punchy but don’t worry about structure and climax. The album has the amazing quality of behaving as if The Fleshtones are playing at a club you’re at, while you’re having a great conversation and perhaps have gotten a little drunk. Listening to a Fleshtones take on Day Tripper, you keep idly wondering where it’s going next, then wonder suddenly if you’ve completely missed the lyrics; there aren’t any; and it would have ruined the cover if there were. “Bite of My Soul” is mixed not so nobody sounds up-front: not the lead vocals, not the shouty chorus. The aforementioned “You Give Me Nothing to Go On” comes in a regular version and an instrumental version… and the instrumental one is longer, and arrives on the album five tracks sooner.

So many of their old new wave compadres—from Greg Kihn to Paul Collins—turned to solo acoustic blues as a soundtrack for their middle age crises that it became a genre cliché. I hope Brooklyn Sound Solution is as close as The Fleshtones ever come to that. It gets a little darker and a little slower than a lot of other Fleshtones records, but then so did 1994’s Beautiful Light. This is a full-band work-out that shows the eb and flow of Fleshtones rather than just the shouty highlights. That’s a mature statement, but it’s not old-man rock. It’s The Fleshtones showing they