There is a specific kind of difficulty that comes with making a record while someone you trusted turns out to be a person you should never have trusted. A.C. Newman has been writing about loss and dissolution on New Pornographers records for twenty years, usually at a slight remove, inside some tightly constructed pop conceit that keeps the ugliness at a manageable distance. The Former Site Of does not entirely abandon that approach. But the distance feels different here. Shorter. More earned in the wrong way.

The backstory shadows the record whether you invite it to or not. Longtime drummer Joe Seiders was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography, forcing the band to rebuild sections of the album they had already recorded. Session musician Charley Drayton came in to replace his parts. Newman described the experience to Rolling Stone as consistent with the album’s central theme, dealing with loss in its many forms, and offered the grim observation: “Why would something good happen?” It is a bleak frame for a pop record. But The Former Site Of is a bleak pop record, and the frame fits.

What saves it from being merely depressing is that the New Pornographers are constitutionally incapable of making ugly-sounding music. The hooks are still there. Neko Case’s voice is still one of the most stunning instruments in the band’s arsenal, deployed on several tracks here with a kind of precise devastation that makes you understand why every New Pornographers album lives or dies on how much she gets to do. She gets to do a lot on The Former Site Of, and those are consistently the album’s best moments.

Newman’s own songs are denser than usual, more interested in texture than in the radio-shaped craft that defined records like Twin Cinema and Challengers. “Backlit” and “The Place It Was” both move through chord progressions that feel earned rather than calculated, with arrangements that reward repeat listens but do not show off in the first pass. A few tracks in the middle sag slightly under their own seriousness, moments where the band seems to be wrestling with what the record is supposed to be saying rather than just saying it.

Kathryn Calder contributes two co-writes that are among the album’s most immediate songs, which is not a new pattern for her but is worth noting anyway. The New Pornographers have always been a collective that operates as a band, and The Former Site Of leans on that collective identity more than any album since Together.

It is not their best record. It might be their most honest one. Twin Cinema and Challengers will probably always be the high-water marks by the consensus measure, and nothing here is likely to change that. But given what they were working through to make it, the fact that The Former Site Of is as coherent and as genuinely moving as it is feels like something more than just the usual next-album achievement. It feels like stubbornness in the best possible sense. The site where something good used to be, rebuilt into something worth having again.