“Evil Urges” is a light-funk make-out jam, narrated in a slinky falsetto by frontman Jim James—and things only get stranger when the music morphs into a triple-time prog-guitar rope-a-dope. This is My Morning Jacket? The loosest, jammiest, Southern-rockingest band of the new millennium? These guys started out a decade ago with crying solos and grungy blues boogies, sweating over ground consecrated by the Allman Brothers and Neil Young. But James is awful antsy for a jam-rocker, and he¹s spent the band¹s lasttwo albums relentlessly tinkering with the MMJ DNA.

It’s also the catchiest and most perverse thing this band has ever done, adding to the spacey, sensuous art-pop of 2005’s Z with the muscular guitar mysticism MMJ bring to their live shows. Not all the moves are radical: The soulfully swaying, string-laden “Thank You Too” and “Sec Walkin’”—a country nugget that could have been written by Willie Nelson in 1965 (“Left leg, right leg/One leg at a time/I keep on walkin’”)—are genteel showcases for James’s froggy but magnificently expressive tenor.

But what’s most compelling is the thread of creepy paranoia throughout, like the “Mr. Roboto”-esque electro bubblegum of “Highly Suspicious” and the two-part “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream,” which contrasts a slow, sailing melody with jarring drum machines, as James’s lyrics of romantic yearning transform into self-­questioning Cylon dread: “I need a human right by my side.” The Am I a robot? theme pops up a lot here, and it gets eerier with each appearance. It’s a sign, perhaps, that James’s itch to escape his all-too-human pigeonhole as a musky jam-rock revivalist is matched by a sense of terror at what lies beyond.

Download “Evil Urges,” “Highly Suspicious,” “Thank You Too”