Like “Have a Great Summer,” Let’s Stay Friends is the sort of thing you write in a an acquaintance (rather than a friend)’s yearbook at the end of the school year, knowing full well you won’t see them again. But, according to the band, it’s just a simple genuine name for a record “about unwillingness to give up—it’s a resolution to defy the forces which wear away at our innocence and enthusiasm,” a declaration of “their ultimate goals of being together, writing, and performing on their own terms.” It’s a sweet sentiment for Les Savy Fav’s return after a long off-and-on hiatus and some dispiriting talk of an ambient record (Rabbit Trancing I think it was supposed to be called). But it’s also merely a reasonable set of goals, as opposed to say an impossibly romantic manifesto, and the resultant album is fittingly fine but not a radical or triumphant stretch for the band.

Harrington has largely abandoned the rapid-fire lyricism of Go Forth for more of the calmer singing explored on the early songs of Inches and recent tracks “Wake Up a Snake,” Hit By Car,” and “Hit By Train.” The band, meanwhile, continues to polish up their disco-inflected post punk, with Seth Jarbour’s guitar work remaining probably the most striking element.

“Pots & Pans” is one of those songs about bands that the kids (see: Art Brut, the Hold Steady) are so fond of these days and that Les Savy Fav already covered with Inches intro “Meet Me in the Dollar Bin.” The track marches forth on restrained martial snare rolls, plodding bass, and bright, rising guitars. First single “The Equestrian” is a fried, distorted rocker in the vein of “The Rodeo” or “Blackouts on Thursday,” except without a similarly catchy chorus to hold onto.

“The Year Before the Year 2000” is equally self-aware, seeming to reference Tim Harrington’s lyrical penchant for morbid and apocalyptic imagery (“If my dear/you think the end is near/please do check/your frontal hemisphere”) while updating the desperate dance rock of “The Sweat Descends” (“Everybody please keep trying/trying to party like it’s 1999”). “Patty Lee” is an odd falsetto funk, a plea to the title character to untie the singer from the headboard and turn the lights on (“This party’s gotten out of hand”). It suddenly occurs to me that a band as obsessed with death as Les Savy Fav must work through the five stages of grief over and over in song; here, they’re in bargaining mode, but they’re just as ofen disbelieving, angry, depressed, and accepting.

The moon-howl of “What Would Wolves Do?” certainly finds the band in a more peaceful mode, reflecting on a mythological early human past (“We saw the ocean and drank it down/’cause we were giants…we slept with lions”) as an extended metaphor for faded youth (the inverse of the band’s greatest theme). “Brace Yourself” is a laid back existential meditation, full of echoing flutes and keyboards and just the occasional (also echoing) shout.

“Raging in the Plague Age” (previously available on an Australian tour 7”) manages to simultaneously send up AC/DC and Edgar Allen Poe (“I used to hold the biggest balls/deep inside my castle walls”), while covering some familiar ground—living it up in the shadow of death—this time illustrated as a bubonic, medieval kegger. “Slugs in the Shrubs” revives some of Harrington’s old, ragged bark, as does “Kiss Kiss is Getting Old.”

“Comes & Goes” is as near to a sweet, straight ballad as Les Savy Fav tends to get, all western guitar jangle and understated rhythm, but even it’s chief lyric suggests illness as easily as it does a lover. “Scothgard the Credit Card” is a soaring, stomping ode to “the pointlessness of plans” and “the present-tense.” “The Lowest Bitter” ends the album on an upward note, adding glossy horns to Harrington’s thin, straining sing-song and the band’s steady drive.

After six years since their last proper album, it’s impossible to not have unrealistic expectations built up. I’ve spent so long listening to their old albums, the Inches compilation, and their recent singles, that I’ve been expecting Let’s Stay Friends to somehow outshine all their previous work put together. It doesn’t. After a week of listening, it’s not my favorite Les Savy Fav record by a stretch, and I don’t really think it’s going to be. (I tend to think Inches is the best, but maybe that doesn’t count being a comp; I would place this album somewhere between Cat & the Cobra and Go Forth.) But even a middling record in Les Savy Fav’s discography is better than 80% or 90% of what else is out there, and I have a feeling that little moments and lines on this album will grow on me in the time between now and the band’s Nobember 30th show at Neumo’s.