The last decade was good to Spoon, who responded to being dropped from major label Elektra in 1998 by achieving commercial success with superindie Merge, with whom they released Girls Can Tell, Kill The Moonlight, Gimme Fiction and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Over the course of that four-record run the band saw their sales improve to the point that they broke the Billboard Top 10 in 2007; the critical consensus surrounding their work turned near-unassailable, and thus they entered the 2010s with a reputation as one of the most reliable bands working today. They produce accessible pop music that hints at experimentation, but never let it stand between the band and a song. The band’s risk-taking was relatively safe: something for which one would have to listen, rather than something that hits immediately: as frontman Britt Daniel and drummer/producer Jim Eno were certainly interested in sound, but still had hooks and striking melodies at the forefront of their music.

Transference differs in that it is not a refinement of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga in any way; it tries hard to sound fragmented and broken, it flirts more openly with psychedelia than anything the band has done before, and rarely does Daniel exude the confidence he seemed to carry on the band’s last two albums. Songs occasionally sound like unfinished demos, reducing mid-line to their most skeletal elements in low fidelity, the percussion sounds relentlessly digital, songs suddenly and inexplicably cut out mid-line, leaving some to wonder if early copies of the album were defective. There are obvious, abrasive hard pans in the stereo mix, reminiscent of obnoxious production techniques from the late ’60s.

Consider “Written in Reverse,” the album’s first single. It sounds like some sort of vicious kissoff, but one that Daniel simply can’t bring himself to deliver; he says little more than “that lightbulb’s gone out” and “I want to show you how I love you, but there’s nothing there.” “Before Destruction” opens the album obviously wounded, almost like an extended three-minute introduction than a song itself, with reverb-heavy, wordless vocals and a ceaseless drum loop taking the forefront of the mix, well above an acoustic guitar and voice arrangement that sounds deliberately tinny. “Goodnight Laura” sounds deliberately unfinished; it features a second verse in which Daniel repeats a vocal melody almost exactly as it was in the first, but without any words, as if this is clearly a reference version that could have been reworked into something much grander.

And those moments are here, too; “Trouble Comes Running” sounds like a ragged, lo-fidelity version of Gimme Fiction single “Sister Jack” with Guided By Voices: like sutures between segments, as it cuts in and out of the full band arrangement. The melody and the chorus are so strong, however, that they carry the song effortlessly. Points also go to the battered “I Saw The Light,” perhaps the one song here in which nothing suddenly falls apart, yet the song gives way to a lengthy, cerebral outro that hints at, but never delivers anything explosive.

It’s hard not to read Transference as a breakup album, and it’s even harder to read it in Spoon’s chronology. Whereas on Girls Can Tell, Daniel sang about these things with an Elvis Costello-like energy, here his angst turns in on every aspect of these songs, as if there was nothing he could do but make a deliberate attempt to put his destroyed headspace on display through what would be confident, straightforward pop music if only he’d chosen to present it that way. I can’t tell how replayable it is, or if it’ll make it anywhere in my rotation, but it probably deserves more than a dismissive description like “interesting.”