Back with his ninth studio album, Baxter Dury teams up with producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence & The Machine) for another misanthropic slice of sleazy disco pop, topped off with a hot new take on his succinct brand of apathy. As Dury explains, “I don’t want to say it’s contemporary, because I sound like a cunt using that word. But it does sound really contemporary.” What this means – and whether it needed changing in the first place – depends on your point of view. What he offers is the musical equivalent of that end-of-night feeling, stuck in a club heaving with people you’d normally cross the road to avoid. So, why does he still inhabit a world he despises? And what do we get out of it?

The obvious place to start is to acknowledge that 53-year-old Dury has collected an armful of musical co-conspirators to make a succession of damned decent disco bangers. And, from 2020’s I’m Not Your Dog to the title track and new single ‘Allbarone’, his hit rate certainly isn’t up for debate. With this album, however, the paradigm looks to have shifted. This new approach to writing and recording, egged on by Epworth’s feverish studio habits, seems to have sharpened Dury’s eye and cranked his sardonic dial up to eleven. In Baxter’s parlance, it’s given him a whole new way to tell some prick to fuck off. That can only be a good thing.

The uptight paranoia of ‘The Other Me’, a kind of ‘Ghost Town’ for the Charli XCX generation, reeks of guilty self-awareness – “I’m ashamed of the chains and the shirts I wear” –  and floats the idea of Baxter Dury as two distinct entities: the one in the shiny suit and Boss trainers, and the one that needs love and understanding. ‘Schadenfreude’ drips with clammy Berghain-esque rhythm and projects his familiar narrative even further; brooding in a hotel room somewhere in Europe, itching to get at it and recounting every sleazy move in his darkly cynical invective.

On ‘Hapsburg’, Dury deconstructs LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Oh Baby’ and turns it into an upbeat voyeuristic nightmare, crammed between “fat duck fuckers” and French actresses who can’t keep a drink to themselves. What little social filter remains is later jettisoned on ‘Return Of The Sharp Heads’, with a children’s choir cooing the words “you’re just a bunch of soul fuckers, you total cunts”. Let’s see Pink Floyd pull that move on their next album.

On this form, Baxter Dury has plenty of nights left in him and Allbarone might just be his best album to date. Contemporary never sounded so good.