Even with the four years the band spent making it, who would have expected CKY’s new album, Carver City, to be this, well, weird? A totally unclassifiable quasi concept album, Carver City doesn’t forsake the band’s polyrhythmic, alternative-metal framework. It just adds countless guitar tracks, layer upon layer of vocals, and deliriously silly and feather-light synth and vocoder parts to the most leaden drum sound imaginable.

At first, this soup of seemingly contrary elements feels hopelessly dense. After a couple of rounds with headphones, Carver City begins to reveal its own wholly bizarre internal logic. Eventually, you’re obsessed with it.

Chad I. Ginsburg, who produced the album at his home studio, laughs at the assessment.

“That’s what our A&R guy said,” the guitarist admits, calling from a Montreal tour stop. “He said, ‘Dude, once this record grabs you, it grabs you by the balls and holds you there. It’s got your fuckin’ nuts forever.’ Well, you get to hear something new every time you listen to it.”

There might be a couple of reasons for CKY’s re-emergence with an album that’ll probably take its place at the forefront of the Pennsylvanian band’s legacy. For starters, CKY’s history as the occasional house band for Jackass and Bam Margera (brother to drummer Jess) is receding into the past, evidently enlarging the band’s imaginative scope beyond crafting the soundtrack to elective testicle torture.

Perhaps more significantly, CKY took a lengthy hiatus before reconvening to finish Carver City. The details of its violent postshow breakup in 2007 remain as murky as the pounding, nightmarish, multitracked album opener, “Hellions on Parade”, but it gave Ginsburg the time to fixate—by his account for “hundreds of thousands of hours”—on the music the four-piece left behind.

“We’ve never spoken to each other fully and in detail about what happened,” Ginsburg confesses. “We were trying to kill each other on the bus and that’s not me even trying to exaggerate. I mean, it felt dangerous.” Eventually, Ginsburg says, “it felt fucking stupid to not be in CKY.”

Which is lucky for us. Carver City is a gas, especially when it comes to a boil in the single “A#1 Roller Rager”. Here, Kyuss-grade riffery is punctuated by cheesy electronic percussion and a flighty synth melody, while the chorus is pure, glorious, falsetto-laced pop. Say hello to your feel-good hit of the summer. Like much of Carver City, it also has a strong ’80s vibe.

“Deron Miller and I grew up then, and we listened to a lot of ’80s pop,” says Ginsburg, referring to the band’s vocalist-guitarist. “I started out listening to a lot of disco and a lot of Michael Jackson. I feel like that music can be blended even with what Deron’s into, like death metal. Some of those melodies are hard to get out of your head when you hear them so many times when you’re a kid. We’re still trying to figure it out, man, but I guess coming back to your roots is sometimes a good thing. I dunno what it’s like for kids who grew up on Limp Bizkit and that shit. What are they gonna come back to? And do I have to be around for it?”

CKY plays Richard’s on Richards on Sunday (June 28).