In a musical atmosphere increasingly dominated by iTunes and Limewire—where consumers download a band’s hit single and move on—less and less attention is paid to that ugly, dying relic, the cohesive album.

But following 2003’s high-concept, circus-themed The Greatest Story Ever Told, Chicago punk trio The Lawrence Arms has again created a bold and thematic record, making great use of the band’s two lead singers, Chris McCaughan and Brendan Kelly (who, as always, sounds like he smoked about twenty cigarettes before laying down each track).

The band’s new album, Oh! Calcutta! (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1969 off-Broadway all-nude play of the same name), like all Lawrence Arms records, spends a lot of time on introspection and alcohol. In the song “Jumping the Shark” Kelly sings, “The years fly right by with a drink./ It’s morning in this small apartment/ and I just threw up in the sink.”

The album’s theme centers on letting go of your past, and in the chorus of the same song, Kelly sings, “Tonight, tonight, I’m walking away./ I don’t want to hear about old days./ What are we doing today?” This lyrical movement toward fashioning your own lifestyle is a shift from the self-loathing and apathy pervasive since the band’s 1999 debut, A Guided Tour of Chicago.

All these English class theatrics are well and good (and expected from one of the most literate bands in punk music), but the more critical question is, does the record rock?

Well, yes. It rocks harder as an album than anything these guys have recorded since their days in the political punk band The Broadways. And while it doesn’t have the emotional weight of the Arms’ 2002 masterpiece Apathy and Exhaustion, it has all the rock and a whole lot more.

It’s the band’s most musically interesting and complex record, infusing elements of jazz, blues and hardcore, while retaining its distinctive punk sound. Drummer Neil Hennessy continues to expand his method and style, creating an iron backbone for a band with a lot of it.

And in keeping with the album’s theme of walking away, Kelly walks away from mainstream punk, sending up that most hallowed of summer punk rock concerts with a hilarious country tune entitled “Kickass Summer Warped Tour Extravaganza (Major Excellent).”

All the focus on Kelly doesn’t imply any lack of skill from McCaughan, whose songwriting and guitar work is better than ever. On previous records, McCaughan served as a slow-paced foil for Kelly’s often menacing speed, but here he is every bit as aggressive as his bass-playing counterpart. This lends itself well to the constant use of dual vocals on the record—McCaughan and Kelly sing parts of every song.

Put simply, Oh! Calcutta! is one of the smartest, cleverest, and most unique punk rock records to come out since … well … the Lawrence Arms’ last record.