The Strokes’ 2001 debut, Is This It, hummed like a sleek machine — all spring-loaded riffs, artfully slurred come-ons and downtown cool. But then, with 2003’s Room on Fire, they went and did it all over again … only this time not as well. Critics balked, and fans bought only half as many copies. So on album three, it’s time for a change — one born, it seems, of market ambition as much as artistic evolution.

Longtime Strokes producer Gordon Raphael is all but absent here, replaced by David Kahne, who’s best known for giving poppy skate-punks like Sublime and Sugar Ray their asphalt burns. The difference shows: First single “Juicebox” rumbles along on a blistering helicopter riff and a low-end thrash that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Velvet Revolver album, while guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. shreds “Vision of Division” like Tom Morello in Chucks and a skinny tie. Their songs used to lock together like pins and tumblers; these jostle and scrape, metal on metal.

At 52 minutes — almost twice as long as their last album — there’s enough room for vintage Strokes too. Songs like “Electricityscape” crackle with the promise of a Manhattan Saturday night, while the Barry Manilow–jacking “Razorblade” has their trademark liquidy guitars and delightfully snide chorus (“My feelings are more important than yours”). But where disenchantment was once an accessory they wore like a favorite pair of sunglasses, now it sounds real. Kahne brings Julian Casablancas’s voice front-and-center, scrubbing away the 19 layers of distortion to expose the real grit underneath, and what he finds isn’t happy: “I’m tired of everyone I know.” “Today they’ll talk about us and tomorrow they won’t care.” And the most devastating of all, from album closer “Red Light”: “Can’t you see the sky is not the limit no more?”

Earth is the sound of a band coming to that inevitable realization: five patrician perfectionists who’ve resolved to sound sloppy, even (or especially) at the risk of fucking up. A few years ago, only the Strokes’ $200 jeans and carefully mussed hair were dirty. Now their hands are too.

Download: “Juicebox,” “Vision of Division,” “You Only Live Once”