In 1978, the science fiction author Douglas Adams was trying to dream up a kind of interstellar Long Island Iced Tea—a drink that could get all the alien races of the universe equally trashed. He called his concoction the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, and in his radio series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he noted that consuming one was like “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.”

What Adams was describing, to perfection, was the experience of listening to a N.E.R.D. single: the strange, visceral pleasure to be found in what is too often excruciatingly painful. “Lapdance,” “Everyone Nose,” “She Wants to Move”: Even if you liked these songs (and I did), you were responding to the idiot provocation of the beats, to the thundering simplicity of their repetitive choruses.

You might be able to add “Lemon,” the first single from N.E.R.D.’s first album of original songs in seven years, to that list if not for Rihanna. She’s the first of several guest stars to elevate No_One Ever Really Dies, which features Future, Gucci Mane, Wale, Kendrick Lamar (twice!), André 3000, M.I.A. and even Ed Sheeran. It’s the first N.E.R.D. record to include such an extensive list of guests. One of the best decisions that the trio of Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, and Shae Haley make on their new album was calling in those favors.

In the early aughts, Williams and Hugo’s duo the Neptunes pushed rap forward with their percussion stir-fry, candied samples, and tolerance for negative space. But N.E.R.D. is often dismissed, as this website once put it, as “a reliable repository for all of Pharrell’s worst” ideas. And it’s true that the lesser N.E.R.D. songs, the B-sides, are often sewn together from scraps that the super-producers wouldn’t have dared to offer an A-lister. Still, particularly on 2002’s In Search Of… and 2008’s Seeing Sounds, there was something thrilling about these pedigreed engineers of pop breaking their toys and making jagged things out of the discarded parts, creative little mergers of rock and rap that anticipated the genre-mixing we’re seeing today.

Unfortunately for the group’s apologists (which include Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean, and, well, me), a newly woke Pharrell has decided that the operative mode of No_One Ever Really Dies is activist chic. It’s a pretty disastrous look. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news or who’s running my country but it’s a real fucking shit show,” he told The Guardian recently. “I’ve never seen such desperation in my life.” Leaving aside the question of whose desperation he is referring to, Pharrell does not sound equipped to make a protest record here, nor does he sound interested in making one. That means even the better songs here are hamstrung by stabs at seriousness so vacuous that they seem like parodies. “Deep Down Body Thurst” includes this bumbling salvo, ostensibly directed at President Trump: “Oh you won’t get away/The way you treat Islam/Oh you won’t get away/Jesus will open his arms/Oh you won’t get away (hey hey)/Mr. Wizard of Oz.”

Still, the album’s first half sounds relatively strong, powered almost exclusively by that poised Rihanna verse on “Lemon” and Kendrick channeling “B.O.B.”-era OutKast on “Don’t Don’t Do It”—a song inspired by Keith Scott, the black man who was fatally shot by police in Charlotte, N.C. last year. Tune out its lyrics, and “Deep Down Body Thurst” is urgent and catchy, opening with the downtempo piano chords that the Neptunes have long favored and slowly pumping itself as bass, drums, and Spymob-style guitar chords are added to the mix.

But No_One Ever Really Dies runs into a wall midway through, as old ideas rear their heads like those nobbly-headed creatures in Whac-a-Mole. The band has long loved interludes and presents some good ones here. “Voilà” includes a fun little chant. The melody in the middle of “Rollinem 7’s,” though it forestalls André 3000’s verse, makes for a decent digression. But Pharrell’s impatience also bloats the worst songs out of proportion. “Esp,” the record’s nadir, runs on the fumes of bass blasts and bad lyrics for five and a half minutes. And while it’s possible to develop a soft spot for the melodies on the otherwise dopey “Lightning Fire Magic Prayer,” there’s no reason it should be nearly eight minutes long. Elsewhere, do we really need “Drop It Like It’s Hot”-style bubble pops on both “Lemon” and “Lifting You”? Or a song like the pandering “Secret Life of Tigers,” which, musically, offers nothing that Britney fans didn’t hear in 2001?

That’s perhaps what’s most striking about No_One Ever Really Dies: the way these former architects of Future Sound have become handmaidens to their past. The weaknesses on their previous records (other than Nothing, which every good N.E.R.D. fan ignores) came from ideas that pointed off in new directions even if they weren’t fully fleshed out. Here, even the better songs are recycled, as the band lives off blood infusions from its guestlist. Out of the game so long, the N.E.R.D. antennae have picked up on something extra-musical in the air, and crafted their old sound around it. It sadly renders as a piece of resistance-bait, one whose clumsy, on-the-nose message slams you in the head harder than most of its songs.