It’s considered one of the greatest cities on Planet Earth, but that doesn’t mean New York comes without major challenges, especially if you’re committed to making art instead of a killing on Wall Street.

Parquet Courts singer-guitarist Austin Brown pledges an undying love for his adopted home, but at the same time acknowledges that it’s getting harder and harder to live there.

“New York is a really difficult place, and it isn’t getting much easier,” the Texas-spawned musician says, talking on his cellphone from California’s Venice Beach, where Parquet Courts is on a tour stop. “What’s happening in New York is what I saw in San Francisco—where it’s becoming so expensive that basically only rich people can live there.”

That difficulty is magnified when Brown gets home from tour.

“I tend to be exhausted or road-worn, and when you get back you want to be in a place where you can unwind,” he relates. “It’s a really busy place where lots of people are working really hard. It’s also really dirty. I never minded these things before, but it’s becoming so overwhelmingly expensive that it’s got me thinking if it’s the kind of place that I can be anymore.”

The upside of this is that Brown and his bandmates—singer-guitarist Andrew Savage, bassist Sean Yeaton, and drummer Max Savage—found themselves with no shortage of inspiring things to write about when they began working on Human Performance, their excellent fourth album as Parquet Courts. While the Big Apple isn’t the sole focus of the 14-track release, there are enough lyrical references to make the record a great companion piece to LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, Lou Reed’s New York, and Nas’s Illmatic.

On the wiry protopunker “2 Dead Cops”, Parquet Courts rips a page straight from the local news, recounting the true tale of police officers being gunned down in Brooklyn: “Said a police bastard, ‘We lost two lives’/G-train delayed, ‘What else is new.’ ” “Captive of the Sun”—which gives you a good idea what Sonic Youth might have sounded like if Thurston Moore had been obsessed with hip-hop—features the line “Skull-shaking cadence of the J train rolls/The rhythm of defeat, repeating like a pulse.”

Brown calls “Captive of the Sun” one of the most important songs on Human Performance, mostly because it showcases Parquet Courts as a band determined to push itself artistically.

“We didn’t do the things that came most natural this time,” he reveals. “We’ve written a lot of Parquet Courts songs—it’s really easy for us to write songs that sound like our band. Human Performance was us trying to write songs that wouldn’t fit on any of our other records, that were distinctly new, but also distinctly us.”

So although 2014’s Sunbathing Animal scored on top 10 lists for its driving update of classic college rock, the quartet decided to reinvent itself. Hence, you get “Paraphrased” channelling double-nickels-on-the-dime punk, “Human Performance” dragging golden country through Loungeville, and “I Was Just Here” serving math rock at its most angular.

Brown says Parquet Courts has learned something over the past few years, namely that there’s nothing wrong with embracing one’s inner art star. He and Savage knocked off a quick EP, Tally All the Things That You Broke, before recording Sunbathing Animal, and then followed that up with a quickly released 2014 full-length called Content Nausea. Both were issued under the banner of Parkay Quarts, and contained songs deemed in some way unfit for Parquet Courts.

“We recorded 30 songs altogether, before whittling them down to the ones that made the record,” Brown says of Human Performance. “Songs like ‘Captive of the Sun’ or ‘Dust’ and ‘I Was Just Here’ were kind of outliers in the whole process. But they became the ones that were most important to the record. Songs where we’d initially say ‘That’s kind of weird—I don’t know if it fits in with what we’re doing’ became important. In the way that Tally All the Things That You Broke was a collection of odd songs that didn’t make it onto Sunbathing Animal, this time around, making Human Performance, we really wanted to champion those outliers. Those are the songs that are most unique and say the most about what we’re capable of doing.”

As much as one could be forgiven for thinking that New York has ground down Parquet Courts, Human Performance ends on an almost hopeful note, with a soothing female voice popping up in the middle of “Dead Again” to intone “With your eyes open, or your eyes closed/Take a moment to connect with where you are.”

Brown knows exactly where he’s going to be when he gets back off the road. And while he’s in the middle of a rough patch, one gets the feeling that maybe everything will be okay.

“I think New York is the greatest city in the world,” he says. “I fell in love with the place when I moved here eight years ago. I still love it, but we’re just having a difficult time in our relationship now.”

Parquet Courts plays the Vogue Theatre on Saturday (August 27).