Even though he has every reason to be excited about the future of a recharged Black Mountain, singer-guitarist Stephen McBean is in a reflective mood when talking about the band’s stellar new full-length, IV.

In the beginning, for the release of its 2005 debut Black Mountain, one of Vancouver’s greatest-ever bands positioned itself as a hippie-commune collective. Black Mountain was, if you believed the press clippings, a mini-army of perma-stoned rockers completely devoted to the cause of making music together.

Over the years, though, the band would prove anything but a sole obsession for its members.

In the mid-’00s, singer Amber Webber and drummer Joshua Wells launched the golden-hued Lightning Dust, a haunting synth project with three full-lengths to its credit. McBean has released four albums under the guise of Pink Mountaintops, as well as re-embracing his inner punk rocker as guitarist for L.A.–based hardcore revivalists Obliterations.

Keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt has taken synth soundscapes to mind-melting new levels with his much-celebrated analogue-obsessed project Sinoia Caves; check out his Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack for one of the most endlessly trippy records of the decade.

And because of all these projects, McBean suggests, Black Mountain is receiving some of the best reviews of its career for IV. And that’s reinvigorated a band that, after 2010’s raging Wilderness Heart, found itself wondering if it had anything left to say.

“After the first record, there was Pink Mountaintops, then Lightning Dust, and all these different things,” the laconic frontman says, on his cellphone in a tour van headed to Chicago. “At first, we were like the Black Mountain Army, the little gang, and then we separated into all those bands. In hindsight, we wanted all those bands to have their own identities, which they should.

“For me, I built walls—people would always say, ‘Which songs goes to Pink, and which ones to Black?’ But for this record, we all kinda threw whatever we had in there. Amber would go, ‘I’ve had this Lightning Dust song for years—maybe that will work.’ And we’d be like, ‘That would totally work.’ ”

Overseeing last year’s deluxe reissue of Black Mountain would also influence IV. Rather than retread the riff-monster bombast of Wilderness Heart and its predecessor, In the Future, the band recaptures the art-weirdo heaviness of its debut while updating that sound for those whose idea of a killer Friday is two grams of hash and stack of vinyl John Carpenter soundtracks.

Those looking for deliriously heavy guitar will thrill to the back half of the otherworldly “Mothers of the Sun” or the grey-matter-frying “(Over and Over) The Chain”. But more often than not it’s Schmidt who’s the star of the show on IV, his work awe-inspiringly crazy on the broken-bottle new wave of “Florian Saucer Attack” and spookily sublime on the black-light mindfuck “You Can Dream”.

“Revisiting Black Mountain with the remastering, there was some deep listening,” McBean remembers. “There was a certain fun and innocence to that record that influenced this record. That made me remember a lot of bands that I was listening to back then. It was all krautrock or Swedish psych and Mayo Thompson—that was the soundtrack of 2003.”

Back then, McBean was doing mailouts for Vancouver’s now-defunct Scratch Records, owned by former Superconductor drummer and man about town Keith Parry. (Those into obscure Vancouver rock trivia might remember Superconductor as the first big band of the New Pornographers’ Carl Newman. Those into really obscure trivia will recall that Scratch’s on-duty clerk was usually Anne-Marie Vassiliou, currently known better as the drummer for White Lung).

McBean’s affection for that time is obvious, which might partly explain why the Victoria-raised frontman is also nostalgic about Vancouver, which he abandoned for Los Angeles just under a half-decade ago. With the rest of Black Mountain still living in Lotusland, the singer spent chunks of last year here while writing IV.

“It’s strange how it’s changed,” McBean says. “Gentrification everywhere has reared its head. It’s been kept in check to some degree, but it’s weird going to Save-On Meats or Funky Winker Bean’s, or the Cobalt is a nice bar with nice drinks.”

Vancouver has changed, but McBean in some ways hasn’t. While Black Mountain may have been on the back burner for the past few years, he’s never lost his passion for songwriting, something he’s been doing playing in punk and metal bands since his teens in Victoria.

Being as into it as he sounds on IV probably amazes him. The singer is closing in on 50, an age at which most have long given up on the rock ’n’ roll dream. Those who haven’t tend to fall into two categories: the spookily blessed (think Neil Young or Nick Cave—artists who seem to have a bottomless well of killer songs) and those who continue to plug away with seriously diminishing returns because it beats digging ditches or working in a car wash.

With Black Mountain, McBean remains solidly in the former camp, and IV is one of the epically great records of the year.

“I guess it’s weird because of the whole ageism thing in rock ’n’ roll or indie rock or whatever this is,” he charges. “If I look back to when I was 20 and went and saw some dude playing his guitar and shaking his head like a little Muppet at age 47, I’d be like, ‘No fucking way. That dude’s a fucking grandpa.’

“But in the circles we kind of travel in, there’s people playing music into their 60s and sometimes 70s and doing it well. It used to be you’re 25 and you’re done because you’re not pretty anymore.

“Luckily,” McBean adds with a wry snort, “we’re a really pretty band, so there’s no problem there.”

It makes sense that McBean is soldiering on, because he’s a rock traditionalist at heart. Consider, for example, the very title of IV, which inarguably sounds more like the spirit of the ’70s than technology-obsessed 2016. Much has been made of the album’s cover art by Schmidt: as a Concorde jet flies overhead, a figure stands in the middle of a burning garden wearing a futuristic-looking helmet.

The general assessment is that the cover is making some sort of statement on how the present world isn’t anywhere near as grand as it seemed before the Internet changed everything forever.

The inarguable strength of the songs, meanwhile, makes it clear that Black Mountain is every bit as important to McBean as it was in 2005, when the band first arrived on the radar in North America.

“Sometimes, even though I’ll be like, ‘I can’t remember how old I am, or what year it is, or what month it is,’ I’ll look at a calendar, or it’ll be my birthday,” he says, “and then I’ll be like, ‘How am I even here?’ Then we’ll play a place like Madison, Wisconsin, and Dan from Killdozer will be there going, ‘I love your new record.’

“That’s when you’re like, ‘The guy from Killdozer likes our band! How much radder does it get then that?’

“Those are the things that make it special,” McBean continues. “Sometimes you go through the motions and stuff and would rather be sitting on the couch and eating a really good sandwich because you’re exhausted. But if you go on the road and stay on the road, after a certain point it’s impossible to get off.”

He pauses, laughs, and then adds: “And not sexually.”

Though Black Mountain might have drawn mightily on the past experiences of its band members for IV, its future is still being written.