NEW YORK, NY.- In May, following the death of Steve Albini, the engineer and tastemaker who helped define the aesthetics of independent rock in the early 1990s, a consensus about his past work started to emerge: Among the slew of albums that Albini recorded in those days, few encapsulated his signature sonic wallop — and the potency of the broader scene he championed — better than the early work of the Jesus Lizard.

On triumphs like “Goat” (1991) and “Liar” (1992), vocalist David Yow, guitarist Duane Denison, bassist David Wm. Sims and drummer Mac McNeilly skillfully wedded the thudding force and lascivious groove of the ’70s arena-rock gods they grew up on with the grimy racket of the ’80s underground.

Earlier this year, when the band started announcing a new run of festival appearances and headlining dates — the latest chapter in a sporadic reunion that commenced in 2009, 10 years after the band’s initial breakup — it seemed like another chance for both old heads and newer converts to salute the band’s illustriously chaotic past. What no one could have expected is that this time around, the Jesus Lizard wouldn’t just be reaffirming its legacy but adding to it. This fall, it will unveil its first studio album in 26 years: “Rack,” a raucous record that recaptures the lunging momentum, stealth nuance and unhinged Yow-isms of its best work.

The uncanny timing of the announcement, arriving when the band is already being celebrated anew, is pure coincidence: The album, out Sept. 13, has been about five years in the making.

In a video interview from his Altadena, California, home, with posters for “Taxi Driver,” “Pulp Fiction” and other gritty film classics on the walls, Yow gushed like a proud parent over “Hide and Seek,” the album’s rampaging lead track. “It’s got so many hooks,” the 63-year-old vocalist said, his gray goatee framing a wide grin. He added that he’d gotten in the habit of asking both his bandmates and his wife, with a mixture of irony and wonder, “Have we written a pop song?”

Denison, 65, was amused and skeptical. “I don’t know what pop music David Yow’s listening to,” he deadpanned during a video interview from the combination library and music room of his Nashville, Tennessee, home. “I don’t think Beyoncé or Lil Nas X are going to be jealous.”

Pop prospects aside, the Jesus Lizard’s distinctive play of chaos and control has long made it a touchstone among peers like Nirvana, who shared both live bills and a rare split single with the band.

“Listen to songs like ‘Scentless Apprentice’ and ‘Milk It’ from ‘In Utero,’” Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad wrote in an email, “with those burly, repetitive riffs and deranged, ranting vocals, they’re practically homages to the Jesus Lizard.” In “Book,” a 2014 tome commemorating the history of the Jesus Lizard to that point, Albini, a notoriously blunt observer, called them “the best musicians I’ve ever worked with.”

Yow, Denison and Sims formed the group in Austin, Texas, in 1987, following the breakup of Yow and Sims’ prior band, the nightmarish Scratch Acid. After moving to Chicago, they recruited McNeilly, an Atlanta drummer they’d met when his band 86 played in Texas. The quartet’s initial run yielded four indie classics, two inventive, undervalued major-label efforts and a storied trail of live bedlam. They split up amicably in 1999, but remained a touchstone for subsequent generations; in 2022, Keke Palmer wore a Jesus Lizard shirt in Jordan Peele’s sci-fi horror film “Nope,” sparking a wave of interest.

Austin Tackett, the bassist for the Oklahoma City noise-rock outfit Chat Pile, said in a phone interview that among younger acts aiming for a caustic heaviness, the Jesus Lizard remains “the dragon that everybody’s chasing.”

Denison has been the most musically active in the years since, continuing on with projects including the alternative-metal supergroup Tomahawk. Yow has collaborated with such bands as the Melvins, Qui, Flipper and the Dicks — an Austin punk outfit whose frontman, Gary Floyd, was a key early influence — while making a serious run at acting, taking on roles including the skeevy antagonist of the 2017 Macon Blair thriller “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.” McNeilly focused on family life and, more recently, began teaching drums and restoring vintage kits; and Sims started a new career as a CPA, in addition to devoting time to fatherhood, a short-lived Scratch Acid reunion along with Yow, and a low-profile experimental solo project, unFact.

Amid what Yow called the Jesus Lizard’s sporadic “reenactment shows,” which continued from 2017 through 2019, the idea of making new music percolated. Denison, Sims and McNeilly — who left in 1996 but returned for the reunion — all quickly got on board.

“I was always into doing it,” McNeilly, 64, said in a video interview from his Evanston, Illinois home, his gracious, thoughtful demeanor contrasting sharply with his flailing attack behind the drums. “It had just been too long.”

Yow was noncommittal at first. “At one point we just had to decide,” said Sims, 60, sipping black coffee outside a midtown Manhattan takeout spot, sporting black Ray-Ban glasses and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “I said to Duane, ‘Look, let’s just keep writing songs and sending the tapes to David.’”

“‘Is he really going to let us make an album without him?’” he added with a laugh.

Impressed with his bandmates’ demos, Yow signed on around 2019 and started workshopping vocals at a mic set up in his home office. “It was embarrassing to do that here with my wife,” Yow said, sounding bashful. “I would ask her, like, ‘Don’t you have some errands you can run?’” Searching for fresh inspiration, he borrowed phrasing ideas on select songs from Lhasa de Sela, a Mexican American singer-songwriter whose 2003 album, “The Living Road,” he called “one of the best records ever made.”

The band refined the material during occasional gatherings in Nashville and tracked “Rack” there last fall at Audio Eagle — the home studio of Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney — with producer Paul Allen, a local guitarist and session musician. As they had in the ’90s, they recorded basic tracks live in the room, without a click track.

Sims said that, during the writing and demoing phase, he’d kept his expectations low, allowing for the possibility that the band might decide to shelve the project if it didn’t live up to their standards. But within the first few days of recording, after McNeilly laid down take after take of what the bassist called “absolutely monstrous” drum tracks, he felt confident enough to fire off a text to David Viecelli, the band’s longtime booking agent, informing him that they were making an album: “Maybe one of our best.”

“I never had the slightest glimmer of fear that, like, oh, they’re going to make something disappointing,” Viecelli said in a phone interview. “That said, the record is astonishing.”

One of the greatest strengths of “Rack” is its utter lack of ponderous maturity. “As much as anything,” Denison said of his aims for the lean, 37-minute, 11-track album, “I wanted to sound like a kid.” Lyrically, beyond a few veiled references to recent history — including pointed lines inspired by Donald Trump — the album plunges the listener back into the same depraved demimonde sketched out in the early Jesus Lizard catalog.

Yow couldn’t contain his laughter when recounting a Parisian scatological mishap that inspired a portion of “Moto(R),” one of several hard-driving rockers on the album’s back half. (“I had had some French coffee, and I had to poo,” he said.) And discussing “Lord Godiva” — the only song on “Rack” with roots in the band’s ’90s era, which comes complete with a beautifully beefy Sims bass solo — Yow highlighted the perverse misdeeds of its bloodthirsty protagonist. “They’re just so stupid and, I think, really funny,” he said.

As much as “Rack” reprises the time-tested Jesus Lizard formula of pulpy lyrical filth matched with volatile, menacing rock, it also reasserts that the band was far more versatile than thumbnail remembrances often suggest. “What If?” is pure skin-crawling moodcraft, driven by a cold-eyed Sims bass vamp, with Yow showing off his sharpened dramatic chops as he monologues about a widow who turns out to be “kinda crazy,” or worse. “Armistice Day” leans into downtempo doom-blues, offset by Yow’s forlorn-sounding croon and a sparse, piercing Denison lead that Yow said “brings tears to my eyes.”

While the LP has a more polished sound than early Jesus Lizard albums, it maintains an admirable rawness that receded on the two records the band made without Albini in the mid-to-late ’90s. Reached after Albini’s death in May, Yow said that in the band’s early days, he “thought of Steve almost as a fifth member.” He praised the way that Albini had rendered guitar, bass and drums each in the “absolute most intense possible way,” and, his voice choking up, recalled a time when he and the engineer were inseparable, often spending entire days shooting pool together at the Chicago Billiard Cafe.

As documented in “Book,” tensions later arose between the band and Albini, and the parties wouldn’t work together again. But Yow said that he and the engineer “ended up sort of patching things up.” He recalled a recent text exchange where Albini had told him, with typical crude flair, that fans were “going to just [expletive] themselves” when they learned that the Jesus Lizard had made a new album.

Reflecting on “Rack,” Denison said that despite his new status as a senior citizen — recently retired from a day job at a branch of the Nashville Public Library, the guitarist is considering when he ought to start collecting Social Security — he was intent on capturing a certain punk-rock abandon. “I’d like to think it’s always been this balance between the sophistication” and “the non-sophisticated,” he said, “just the pure drive and mayhem.”

McNeilly cited the explosive opening of “Hide and Seek,” which sets the tone for what follows.

“It’s almost like, OK, you’re on a ride now,” the drummer said, “and you’re not going to be able to get off.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.