Wire is like that old friend I see every once in a while. Each time I’m not sure what to expect: upbeat sometimes, complex and multi-layered other times or simply straight to the heart. In all cases, Wire is a welcome friend. My relationship with the band began in 1977 with the high-speed and extraordinary punk record Pink Flag. Then, just nine months later, they gave birth to one of my favorite arty rock albums ever, Chairs Missing. Wire’s brilliant new record, Nocturnal Koreans, comes out just about a year after its 2015 self-titled album, and the pair have sent me back — at least in my mind — to the first days and months of falling in love with the band.

This new record was in fact hatched during the same sessions as Wire, and the two albums are very much like the band’s 1977 and ’78 albums in the way they offer different sides of the band. Pink Flag and Wire are direct and powerful, made by a band playing together with very little studio trickery. The songs on Nocturnal Koreans have a different attitude — an anything goes attitude — that shows the band using the studio in any way it can imagine to create a sound. What I hear is closer to the sound from that legendary Chairs Missing record: Mystery reigns. Imagery melds with sound and texture.

Despite the link to the past, this record is of the here and now. And it’s easy to imagine that if this was the first album by a new band, there would be a different level of buzz than what this band gets for album number 15. Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Robert Grey, the three original members of Wire who are still in the band, are 61 and 63 and 64 years old now. I’m sure I’m guilty of age discrimination, or a bias toward what’s new when it comes to music. But I’d love to imagine — for this one record, if nothing else — this record being treated as equal, heard with new ears.

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As Wire’s latest album — its 14th, but the first to simply be called Wire — once again proves, many branches of the alt-rock tree are rooted in Wire’s technique of marrying brusque physicality to heady abstraction: Its subtle but pervasive influence is the only thing linking hardcore punks (Black Flag, Minor Threat), arch guitar bands (R.E.M., Sonic Youth) and willfully synthetic dance acts (Fischerspooner, Ladytron). Even today, a scrappy yet brainy unit like Parquet Courts rarely gets reviewed without a Wire mention.

When I interviewed Colin Newman at the time of Wire’s 2013 album Change Becomes Us, the singer-guitarist said he’d still like to achieve recognition from the 99.9 percent of the world that remains oblivious to Wire. And yet he acknowledged that Wire refuses to raise awareness of its influence by touring behind its greatest hits. During a San Francisco show that year, the band avoided not just its beloved debut, 1977’s Pink Flag, but also the most memorable material from just about every other album in its substantial catalog. Instead, its members alternated between then-unrecorded new songs and their most oblique output as the crowd dwindled.

Wire sometimes revels in this stubbornness. A seemingly heartfelt song, “In Manchester” features Newman crooning wistfully, as if that city held personal romantic significance, while Graham Lewis, who wrote its words, plucks out a nearly giddy bassline. But unlike a similarly bucolic 1979 single exactingly entitled “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” “In Manchester” bears no apparent relation to the location it celebrates; its emphatically catchy chorus is simply the most glaring of the album’s many non sequiturs.

Wire also continues a trend that resumed in the wake of original guitarist Bruce Gilbert’s departure in 2004 — that of catchy tunes performed cohesively. When the foursome reunited at the millennium’s beginning after diverging for ’90s solo projects, its techno-inspired rumble got bleaker and more jarring than even its earliest punk. But with 2008’s Object 47 and 2010’s Red Barked Tree, which was recorded as a three-piece, and Change Becomes Us, the first to feature replacement guitarist/keyboardist Matt Simms, Wire focused more on the communal experience of playing as an ensemble, and not on autonomously piecing elements together in the EDM production style of its ’00s efforts. By once again emphasizing the bonds that make them at least structurally a traditional rock band, the four reconfirmed their accessibility.

Wire both epitomizes and upends this. Peppered with online activities and destinations, “Blogging,” its opening track, contemporizes the Biblical Magi: “Three king researchers use Google Star Maps / Bethlehem manger, a high-rated app,” it begins. A subsequent rhyme references the Book of Matthew stanza about a camel traveling through the eye of a needle more readily than the rich entering God’s kingdom. Here, though, the results are markedly different: “Market moves fast in a blink of the eye / The needle is broken, the camel has died.” By the third verse, Lewis’ lyric shifts almost entirely to web commerce: Divinity lingers only in the latest Apple.

Wire outgrew the punk tag not only because its songs slowed down: By polishing a relatively sedate yet seductive vocal style, Newman learned to sing as if engaging in slightly suggestive conversation, a quality that suits Lewis’ love of both quotidian description and surreal sensuality. Gentle and steady, “Burning Bridges” edges closer to straightforward romanticism than the band has ever dared, as a soothing figure rescues a wayward soul before vanishing in the morning. Yet Lewis cannot resolve this common plight conventionally: “An asbestos chimney can shorten your life,” is this near-lullaby’s last line.

One reason for Wire’s continued relevance is that it was among the very first to achieve a particular aesthetic that would become widespread. By ditching rock’s blues-based traditions while embracing both the mystery of experimental forms and the power of poppy tunes, Wire invented a strain of post-punk that never went away. Although it released its lauded ’70s output on Harvest Records, an EMI imprint, Wire helped pioneer indie rock because it was — and remains — literally artistically independent.

Wire never completely obscures elements of what the band retains — The Byrds’ keening guitars, the brutality of The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd’s particularly English weirdness and, of course, the Ramones’ velocity. But even after nearly 40 years of making records, Wire still mostly sounds like itself on Wire — contrary, obtuse, thoroughly cool but oddly soulful, and full of wit. If you hear the occasional imprint of subsequent musicians (My Bloody Valentine’s layered buzz, Blur’s quaint Britpop, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s monumental drones), that’s because those are among the many bands this one birthed. The 99.9 percent might not yet know it, but it’s a Wire world after all.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.