Just over two decades ago, Gogol Bordello finally cohered on their third album, Gypsy Punks: Underworld World Strike, one of the most unlikely punk masterpieces to ever come from nowhere. (Or everywhere: members hailed from NYC, Ukraine, Russia, Brazil.) Roughened up by hands-off Nirvana/Pixies legend Steve Albini and released by pop-punk stalwarts SideOneDummy, it was the full realization of a band answering the question of what the Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy & the Lash would have sounded like with Romani violins and accordion replacing Irish folk traditionals and pennywhistles.

It kept going and never stopped just like London Calling by their closest analogues the Clash, only in a more niche way with Eugene Hütz’s broken accent and sideways English forming nevertheless shoutable slogans: “Start wearing purple for me now,” “in the old time it was not a crime,” “think locally, fuck globally.” And you missed out if you didn’t catch the tour, where Hütz was prone to climbing atop his bandmate’s marching drum over the pit holding him aloft.

The band has remained active since then, only incorporating more and more genres and languages into their blend, from Portuguese to reggae. And they’ve been chasing the same high to decent degrees of success, with 2007’s Super Taranta!, 2013’s Pura Vida Conspiracy, and 2022’s Zelenskyy-supporting Solidaritine all high points of a catalog more solid than anyone who writes them off as a mere novelty can imagine. The latter even brought in H.R. from Bad Brains for guest vocals and a cover of Fugazi’s “Blueprint”. Their self-explanatory new ninth album We Mean It, Man! comes pretty close, too.

There’s little territory the band hasn’t already covered, but throwing new wave synths and robot-voiced vocoders into their dense mix would qualify. The latter grace the title tune, which already embraces chunky Bad Brains metal riffage and Sergey Ryabtsev’s cinematic violin, which has always functioned like lead guitar in this outfit, the source of hooks and flair and the parts you hum. The synths are everywhere else, like the slo-mo industrial march of “Life Is Possible Again” and the pulsing “Ignition”, which makes flesh the impossible prospect of making this band resemble New Order. When Bernard Sumner himself appears on the finale, “Solidarity (Nick Launay Mix)”, it’s clear this wasn’t an accident.

Hütz himself is one of the most tireless frontmen in the business, which is probably why Gogol Bordello albums take 3-5 years to appear; he’s recharging. At 53, he still chants choruses like they’re the most important slogans ever uttered, in his undiminished Joe Strummer snarl. This is not a band where you wonder how this stuff is translated to the stage; what you see has always been what you get. So the combination of Olympian fiddle fanfare and Gang of Four riffs that build to a disco chorus on a highlight like “Mystics” still manages to come off like business as usual for these trained circus performers’ musical (and on tour, literal) balancing act.

As for the mystical, maybe that’s a theme here (title song starts by chanting “we live in a mystical realm and nobody knows how it works”) because the world is in such chaos that Hütz can only conclude there are supernatural forces at work, but he’s never been blunter politically either. Back-to-back bangers here include “No Time for Idiots” (which has shades of “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”) and the Rancid-like ska of “Hater Liquidator.”

But every track is dependably triumphant, uplifting, loud and uptempo, which is sort of Gogol’s blessing and curse. A band that only ever peaks and never lets the listener rest can make it hard for even big fans to want more frequent LPs than every 3-5 years. Nevertheless, constantly delivering the goods is a gift, and it’s not exactly the time for subtlety. We Mean It, Man! still manages to tweak the Gogol Bordello formula just enough to be different, and it’s still the flurry of punches longtime fans have come to expect.

Light 8 out of 10 / Order here