What makes Michael Shuman proudest about Mini Mansions’ new Guy Walks Into a Bar… is that the album may finally torpedo the notion that the group he’s played in for a decade is something he only does in his downtime.

“We’ve been a band for 10 years, and we’re still kind of creeping along to gain a fan base,” the singer and multi-instrumentalist says, reached on his cell in a tour van headed to Detroit. “We haven’t really garnered a lot of success for much of that time, so it’s been like, ‘Well, are we doing something wrong?’ We’ve also been pigeonholed our whole career as being a side project, but in no way, shape, or form has it ever been that way for us. It just happens to be that we’re in other bands as well.”

That those bands have decidedly higher profiles than Mini Mansions might be part of the problem. Shuman’s other job is playing bass with multiplatinum arena rockers Queens of the Stone Age. Mini Mansions keyboardist-singer Tyler Parkford sometimes tours as a hired gun with the Arctic Monkeys, and bassist-guitarist-drummer Zach Dawes has collaborated with everyone from the Last Shadow Puppets to Brian Wilson and Lisa Marie Presley.

Mini Mansions sounds nothing like any of those acts, the group instead mixing hyperdriven guitars with neon-injected new-wave synths and death-disco drums.

Entirely by design, Guy Walks Into a Bar… sounds more ramped-up than the band’s previous two full-lengths, Mini Mansions (2010) and The Great Pretender (2015).

“Our first two records were warmer and roomier, with lots of sonic space,” Shuman says. “We wanted this one to have harder edges. Because the lyrical content was so direct, focused, and vulnerable, we wanted everything right in front of your face. The lyrics kind of hit you right in the forehead, so the music had to as well.”

Those lyrics tell the story of a relationship Shuman was in while writing Guy Walks Into a Bar…, operating as an accurate account of what went right at the beginning, and wrong at the end. The front half of the album does a brilliant job of capturing the delirious emotions that a new relationship brings.

The blast of sonic adrenaline that is “I’m in Love” helps set things up with “I get a feeling like I’m fucked in the head.” But lust and love eventually give way to a different reality, and “Hey Lover” ends with “Just keep walking, I can take the pain.”

“It was a difficult time, but half of it was amazing,” Shuman says. “That’s kind of how the record plays out—the beginning was fun and loving and romantic, and then things happened and went down a path that you don’t see it going down, as is the case with life. There’s always ups and downs, as there are in making records. The good thing was that we actually had meaning behind these songs­. There was real substance to base the lyrics off of rather than us just making up things out of thin air. Instead of creating stories, we had a real story. In some ways this was the easiest record we ever made, because the lyrics came naturally.”

Mini Mansions plays the Biltmore Cabaret on June 21.