Kurt Wagner has rarely stayed still across his 40 odd years in the music industry. Though often anchored around country-rock roots, he’s dabbled in electronics (the auto-tune mania of the FLOTUS era), soul, ambient and more. After such strident experimentation, he’s stripped it right back to the core on his seventeenth album as Lambchop.

Punching the Clown has little more than guitar (Andrew Broder), banjo (Justin Vernon) and Wagner’s unmistakable twang. But, given who we’re dealing with here, there’s always a twist. This comes in the form of a full choir that provides a Greek chorus to Wagner’s tender musings. They act as traditional backing vocals (‘The New World Wave’, ‘Cigar’) and build to powerful wordless crescendos (‘A Doctor in the House’, ‘Andrew Jackson Asshat’), but also have an untethered, ethereal quality, working in unison with the music or outside of it, as their whim takes them. Wagner was inspired for this album by “lined-out singing” – an ecclesiastical style of call and response that originated in 1600s Scotland before migrating to Appalachia in the late nineteenth century. The spontaneity of its original form is captured on Punching the Clown as the choir inhabits a dreamlike space that contrasts sharply with Wagner’s earthy realism.

Despite the sparse foundations, these songs go into all sorts of interesting directions. Justin Vernon’s banjo-picking is a wonderful complement to the “restrained vocabulary” that Wagner implements, but there’s an uncanny effect at play, much like mid-era Bon Iver or Graham Tolbert’s brilliant cover art. Enigmatic blurbs seep through (“if you ever wonder / what would become of me / eternal soul / of all the men indivisible”) and subtle studio trickery is deployed without warning. ‘White People’ is a truly unhinged cut, starting with operatic bombast and a loose back and forth between Wagner and the choir; finishing with him repeatedly crooning Cutty Ranks’ famous line: “six million ways to die / choose one.”

Although the choir is mostly used in interesting ways, its presence is occasionally overbearing. Some of the best moments are simply hearing Wagner quietly reflect on love and grief over the simple arrangements, as on ‘Stella’ and ‘Afterburner’, where the choir’s contribution is pared back to scene-setting coos. That said, no Lambchop album is complete without a few curveballs and you can’t knock Wagner’s commitment to the concept.

Punching the Clown is a fascinating clash of old culture and modern invention, of individual contemplation and communal performance. It’s unpredictable, insightful and genuinely funny, like so many Lambchop albums over the years.