If you knew Armageddon was really at hand, what would you do? Take to the streets and war against the wicked forces­ that brought Eden to a point of ruin? Lock the doors, dim the lights and weep for the wayward soul of man? Or would you throw one last kick-ass party, knowing you won’t live long enough to feel the hangover?

A few years ago, TV on the Radio were worried and glum; now they’re worried and ecstatic. Singers Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe and sonic whiz Dave Sitek began recording songs in the fall of 2001, partly as a response to the attacks of September 11. Visual artists by trade, they emanated boho cool from the start, palling around with David Bowie and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and inhabiting an air of stylish anomie. Their 2004 debut, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, was an artfully crafted mess—abrasive and prickly, just the thing for a city at perpetual unease. The 2006 follow-up, Return to Cookie Mountain, was even darker. Cryptic and dense, with songs about doomed relationships and eerie urban wastelands, it was hailed as the definitive statement of post-9/11 New York. The album possessed a kind of terrifying beauty; it was also almost totally joyless.

Two years later, doom fatigue has set in. The curiously punctuated Dear Science, (note the comma) sounds like a weight being lifted: The world may be going down in flames, but that’s all the more reason to live it up. “Crying” is a bubbly disco jam about race riots and tanks in the streets, and “Red Dress” deploys a spring-loaded new-wave riff to herald the coming of the Antichrist. “DLZ,” with its scorched-earth guitars and Richter-destroying drums, feels like the End of Days; yet when Malone howls, “This is beginning to feel like the dawn of the luz of forever” (translation: We’re all fucked), you can almost hear his eyes light up. Artists from Prince to R.E.M. to Busta Rhymes have embraced the apocalypse as an excuse to party; TV on the Radio get a revelation from Revelation.

The band made waves in 2005 with their anti-Bush screed “Dry Drunk Emperor,” but they aren’t the types to shout slogans. TVOTR is a political band the way tomatoes are a fruit—vaguely, obliquely, head-scratchingly. When Pitchfork named Cookie Mountain the second-best album of 2006, the reviewer admitted, “I still don’t really know what the songs are actually about,” and Dear Science, is equally enigmatic. “Red Dress” scorns warmongers and smug antiwar hipsters alike, and the delicately pretty “Stork & Owl” is a parable with no clear moral. Best of all is “Family Tree,” a tender, string-laden love song, easily the most beautiful thing they’ve ever done. It could almost be Coldplay, if it weren’t for the lyrics about blood dripping from a gallows.

It helps that the band is relying less on what art schoolers call texture and more on actual songs. TVOTR won the hearts of record-store clerks everywhere by constructing fortresses of noise, impressive but impenetrable. They’ve toned down the distorted-guitar squall and ash gray skronk that blanketed their first two albums; the rhythms are friskier, more vigorous; the hooks accessible and easier to love. If this album were a T-shirt, it would say, FUCK ART, LET'S DANCE. “Shout Me Out” even cribs a snippet of melody from Tom Petty. “There’s a golden age comin’ round!” Malone shouts on the first single, “Golden Age,” a thermonuclear sunrise. Nothing like Judgment Day to make a man feel funky.

Not to mention horny. The album closes with the triumphant army march of “Lover’s Day,” where Malone launches a troop surge in his pants. “Ball so hard we’ll smash the walls!” he moans. “Break the bed and crash the floors!” TVOTR have done sexy before—check the erotically predatory “Wolf Like Me”—but never this desperately. Listen closely, though, and a different kind of hunger emerges. “Tear apart/The apart/We seem to think we are,” Malone pleads, his vulcanized-rubber voice starting to crack. This isn’t a story of lust—it’s a story of reconciliation. When the bombs are done falling and the gashes in the landscape start to scar, this divisive, often difficult band wants to help put things back together.

DOWNLOAD “Crying,” “DLZ,” “Family Tree”