Robyn Hitchcock has spent five decades making all things strange feel strangely familiar. On The Confuser, his 25th solo album and first of entirely new songs in nearly four years, the legendary British songwriter once again wanders through the corridors of love, mortality, cosmic mystery and everyday absurdity, armed with jangling guitars and an imagination unlike any other. The album is classic Hitchcock. Always melodic, sometimes surreal and deceptively philosophical. He continues to be fascinated by the collision of the profound and the ridiculous, finding existential questions hiding inside ordinary moments. The songs may jangle, but deeper inside you’ll find the central theme is considerably darker.

“This record seems to be about disintegration,” he explains. “I’m glad that it feels so peppy, but actually, the common theme seems to be things falling apart.” That’s what gives The Confuser its peculiar electricity. Hitchcock isn’t interested in pretending the world is holding together. Instead, he sifts through the remains after the inevitable collapse. “What are the bones revealed when the flesh comes off?” he ponders.

It’s a question that feels particularly suited to a songwriter whose work has always occupied the border between the earthly and the other. Born in London in 1953, Hitchcock has described his songs as “paintings you can listen to,” and his influences extend as readily to Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico and J.G. Ballard as they do to his musical heroes of the Sixties. His imagination operates according to its own oddball physics, where romance, extinction, insects, planets and bad news can coexist in the same verse.

Hitchcock’s fascination with collapse is hardly new. His first band, the Soft Boys, emerged from London’s late-Seventies art-rock underground to become an influence on generations of musicians. Since then, he’s maintained a deliberately oblique relationship with the mainstream, producing a discography that’s inspired everyone from R.E.M., the Replacements, and Neko Case to Lou Barlow, Uncle Tupelo, Vic Chesnutt and Sparklehorse.

“The news of the day is always bad,” Hitchcock says. “But we’re still here.” That may be the album’s quiet thesis. Things disintegrate. Pieces come back together. The universe remains incomprehensible. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Robyn Hitchcock picks up his guitar and starts painting again.