Onstage on the cozy Chelsea membership Racket in Could, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist had an essential announcement.

“Women and gents!” the frontman shouted to the mess of bopping heads and airborne limbs gathered earlier than him. “Attributable to an unlucky rift within the time-space continuum, it has been 11 years because the Hives performed New York.” He tossed his arms triumphantly within the air, as if touchdown a triple axel. “We’re again!” The group gleefully erupted.

The Hives, a five-piece punk band from Sweden, launched 5 studio albums from 1997 to 2012, making their greatest splash with the only “Hate to Say I Informed You So” — a garage-rock gem that spent 11 weeks on the Sizzling 100 when the group’s second LP, “Veni Vidi Vicious,” arrived in the USA in 2002.

The band bought swept into the “rock revival” of the second alongside the White Stripes and the Vines. However they’d already made their title onstage, the place their arsenal contains matching black-and-white fits and devices, Almqvist’s excessive kicks and charming provocations, roadies dressed like ninjas and a guitarist known as Nicholaus Arson who sneers, crowd surfs and dramatically blows on his curled fingers as he flicks picks into the gang.

“They’re most likely the very best dwell band I’ve ever seen,” stated Max Kuehn, the drummer of the California surf-punk band Fidlar, who was honored when the Hives took his group on the street for its first nationwide tour. “Should you go to plenty of exhibits,” he added, “you may actually inform the distinction of simply how tight their songs are and the way rehearsed every part is.”

Although the Hives continued to play concert events yearly because the arrival of “Lex Hives” in 2012, they’d no recent music to supply — till now. On Friday they may unleash “The Dying of Randy Fitzsimmons,” 12 new tracks full of head-snapping riffs and shout-along choruses led by the explosive single “Bogus Operandi.”

“There was plenty of time the place we didn’t have songs,” Almqvist stated because the quintet gathered at a rooftop restaurant in Manhattan two days after the Racket present, dressed ­­— you guessed it — in matching Hives daywear, white denim jackets with black shirts and denims. “It was like a gradual, 10-year-long panic,” he joked with a slight accent, including a dose of traditional Hives bravado: “It was by no means an outright panic as a result of we continued to be so immensely standard worldwide.”

“However,” he added, “it sucks being in band that doesn’t make new music.”

The Hives have by no means appeared prone to working out of steam. Almqvist and Arson, brothers born a 12 months aside, grew up in Fagersta, a small metropolis a two-hour drive from Stockholm, the place they soaked up each punk report they might get their arms on ­— buying and selling tapes, scraping collectively cash for imports, taking in friends’ rejects. “That’s how we discovered the Sonics,” Arson stated. A buddy handed the LP over, “and it type of blew our minds.” The guitarist rattled off an inventory of acts that had made an affect on them: the New Bomb Turks, the Oblivians, the Stays, the Misfits, the Useless Kennedys, “plenty of ’60s music.”

The unique band — the brothers plus the guitarist Vigilante Carlstroem, the drummer Chris Harmful and the bassist Dr. Matt Destruction — got here collectively within the ’90s when the members have been of their teenagers, and “the mosh pit factor was massive for us,” Almqvist stated. “Going nuts and falling over one another was for us at all times part of the live performance expertise. If the gang wasn’t doing that, it didn’t really feel fascinating.”

Showmanship was a precedence from day one. “I feel earlier than we have been good, we have been entertaining,” added Almqvist, who is understood for his strutting and agitating. (In June, he cut up his head open with a swinging mic.) “Individuals who didn’t like us would nonetheless watch us doing no matter we have been doing, as a result of nobody type of knew what was going to occur.”

The music was quick; Almqvist’s wit matched it. “We grew up on 50 p.c punk and 50 p.c stand-up comedy,” Arson stated, together with “Saturday Evening Reside” reruns on MTV and VHS tapes of Eddie Murphy specials.

Earlier than they might afford props, the Hives thrifted black and white garments, painted a guitar and made their very own light-up signal that blazed onstage, giving them warmth rash. Almqvist estimates they performed 500 exhibits of their first fits. “They smelled so dangerous,” Harmful stated, “once we walked onstage on the finish of the tour, the viewers stepped again.”

However the efforts paid off. The Scottish music enterprise icon Alan McGee turned an early supporter, placing out a best hits of types known as “Your New Favorite Band” in 2001, which introduced the Hives wider consideration from listeners and U.S. report labels.

Interscope reportedly paid tens of millions to safe the band (the Hives nonetheless gained’t verify the quantity) and gave them artistic management. “They created a buzz on their very own, a subculture,” Jimmy Iovine, then the label’s chairman, advised Spin for a 2004 cowl story. “I respect that. I’ll pay for that. I’ll allow them to drive.”

The group caught to its method on “Tyrannosaurus Hives” from 2004 — 12 songs, lower than half-hour — and stretched out on “The Black and White Album” three years later, which featured manufacturing from hitmakers together with Pharrell Williams and Jacknife Lee. “We have been most likely the final rock band to have a giant finances,” Almqvist quipped. “We virtually owe it to rock ’n’ roll to make use of it,” he recalled pondering. (They went impartial and self-produced “Lex Hives” in 2012.)

The Hives have been frequently offered with unlikely alternatives, which they wholeheartedly embraced: recording a Christmas track with Cyndi Lauper, licensing “Tick Tick Increase” for a Nike industrial, taking up difficult assignments opening for each Maroon 5 and Pink in arenas throughout the U.S.

“Now we have to go and discover individuals who hadn’t heard us earlier than. And also you need to have the ability to flip over a crowd,” Arson stated. “It’s a approach of preserving your instruments sharp.”

However new songs — a minimum of, new songs as much as Hives requirements — weren’t flowing. When the pandemic hit, the band dominated out distant recording and turned to a fellow Swede: the producer Patrik Berger, whose credit embrace Robyn’s “Dancing on My Personal” and hits by Charli XCX. Berger had began out in a punk band known as Snuffed by the Yakuza and is “a correct music nerd,” Arson stated; the Hives trusted his judgment.

“They performed me some demos simply to listen to like, which of those, like, hundred songs do you suppose would match on a report?” Berger stated in a telephone interview. “My function,” he defined, was “getting them within the room and begin having enjoyable with these songs once more and never overthink it a lot.”

The result’s a traditional Hives album full of boasts, powder-keg vitality and punk angst. (“They are saying that life’s for residing/However life as we all know it’s a stick up,” Almqvist croons on “Stick Up.”) “Countdown to Shutdown” is constructed on a bouncing bass line by The Johan and Solely, who changed Destruction in 2013. “What Did I Ever Do to You?” originated on a hybrid instrument — an organ, guitar, drum machine and microphone — that Almqvist picked up on Swedish Craigslist for $400, which included the patent.

The album’s title is a nod to some Hives mythology — that they’re the creation of a Svengali named Randy Fitzsimmons, who writes all their songs. In fact, the band labors over each monitor. “They flip each stone,” Berger stated, “just a little bit like working a Rubik’s dice, attempting to determine how can we make this pretty much as good as attainable?”

The band’s absence from recording coincided with a drop-off in rock’s cultural and industrial would possibly, a indisputable fact that supplied Almqvist with a straightforward layup: “I’m simply saying that the Hives don’t launch a report for 10 years, rock turns into utterly unpopular,” he stated. “Coincidence? We predict not.”

Onstage at Racket, Almqvist assured everybody that the brand new songs would quickly be their favorites, and presided over the managed chaos like an exacting however lovable faculty grasp.

“Everyone shut up for one second,” he ordered as the gang clapped barely offbeat to the breakdown of “Hate to Say I Informed You So.” The room went silent. “And now,” he stated, “we restart.” The viewers laughed, obeyed and joyfully threw themselves within the air.