Not unlike the trajectory of many bands before and after them, Spoon’s rise in popularity over the past decade has been inversely proportionate to the quality of the Austin band’s records. After the benchmark Girls Can Tell and the only slightly lesser Kill the Moonlight, the band began a gradual backslide that culminated with the half-baked Transference, which peaked at number 4 on the Billboard 200. (Both Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight failed to even chart.)

I’m going to guess the band loses some fans with They Want My Soul (Loma Vista Recordings), though I’ve never been a good judge of what will strike a chord with the general public. Whether it was taking a little more time off between records (it’s been four years since Transference) or perhaps frontman Britt Daniel being reinvigorated by his Divine Fits side-project, Spoon’s latest eschews some of the populist propensities that have garnered a larger audience for the kind of hotwired creativity that has marked its best work.

Unlike those on Transference, the songs on Soul are fully formed, while the record as a whole migrates through a diverse succession of attitudinal and textural shifts. It leads off with “Rent I Pay,” a mix of blownout riffs, cracking snares, and lyrical hooks that is textbook Spoon at its best, only to transition to the moody synth-led “Inside Out,” which bears some commonality to Daniel’s work in the Divine Fits. The album subsequently moves on to “Rainy Taxi,” a cut laced with a sense of urgency buoyed by a knockout riff, again teetering on the edge of lapsing into the red.

That Spoon rarely plays it straight on Soul only furthers its success. Even the simplest (on the surface) of the record’s songs are aided by treated guitars or the inclusion of a piano line. “Knock Knock Knock,” for example, has a drumbeat run through a phaser that lends an ethereal feel to what otherwise would have been a spare acoustic number. In just 10 tracks, Spoon shows the full range of its abilities and reaffirms that they are still a band capable of making music not only for the masses, but for the ages.