Dismantling the old Shins lineup must have been a bittersweet trade-off for James Mercer. On one hand, it freed him from the interpersonal conflicts inherent in running a band like a democracy, which surely was a relief to a songwriter who never prided himself on his people skills. But it also placed a weight on his shoulders. The sole burden of the band’s music and image now falls squarely on Mercer, including formalities that never seemed to come to him as easy to him as the songs did. During the band’s mid-’00s peak, for instance, Mercer often positioned himself toward the side of stage in concert, happily outsourcing traditional frontman duties like joking and bantering to his gregarious sideman Marty Crandall.

We can’t know whether Mercer laid off his bandmates for creative reasons, as he’s judiciously insisted, or if Crandall’s arrest for domestic assault left him no choice. Either way, he no longer has a real band to help him carry the load, and it takes a toll on him. While the Shins’ music hasn’t changed markedly since that purge in 2008, its image has. The press photos tell the whole story. Remember those old pics of colorful indie dudes horsing around? They’ve been replaced by shots of a lone, forlorn middle-aged guy, trying and utterly failing to look like he’s enjoying himself. The songwriters Mercer most looks up to—icons like Morrissey, Ian McCulloch, Lennon and McCartney—were stars born for the stage, but Mercer never shared their comfort with the limelight. In an interview with NME this winter, he relayed these pressures. “It comes at weird moments in life,” he explained. “Like we went for this big meal the other night because the Shins are releasing a new record, and then I realized that it’s just me in the Shins so all those people were there for me.”

That may be why, for his 2012 Shins reboot Port of Morrow, he created a sort of shadow band, inviting guests like Janet Weiss, Joe Plummer, and Eric Johnson to help carry the weight. As if to suggest that the Shins were still a band, Mercer posed in promo photos with his touring lineup. Heartworms, however, is the first album where he fully embraces the reality that he is the Shins. Self-produced and recorded with a smaller cast than its predecessor, it’s the most hermetic LP he’s released since 2001’s Oh, Inverted World, the last album he recorded himself. At times it overtly calls back to that debut. With its psychedelic patter, “Dead Alive” is an almost direct sequel to “One by One All Day,” drawing out that song’s reverb-soaked outro into its own romp, like some kind of self-written fan fiction.

For as openly as Mercer discusses his anxiety (he dedicates Heartworms’s final song, “The Fear,” to it), he still adheres to a disciplined, “never let them see you sweat” approach in the studio. He creates the illusion that songs come to him quickly, as if pulled from thin air, even if the five year gaps between the last few Shins albums argue otherwise. His gift for making fussy arrangements seem effortless remains unparalleled. Heartworms’ chipper title track is all weightless wonder, as free and euphoric as anything on Inverted World. Opener “Name for You,” a sweetly encouraging piece written for his three daughters, plays as if he raced to the studio to record it while it was still fresh in his mind. And the most Chutes Too Narrow-esque number, “Mildenhall,” shares the same live looseness as that album’s country tunes. An unabashedly autobiographical origin story, it details Mercer’s evolution from military brat to indie rocker: A classmate passes him a Jesus and Mary Chain cassette; he starts fiddling with his dad’s guitar; his dad teaches him some simple chords and, yada yada yada, “that’s how we get to where we are now.”

There’s often been a tension, albeit only a mild one, between Mercer’s classicist pop impulses and his more progressive leanings, and some of that creeps in here, too. The nervy, acid-washed “Painting a Hole” plays like something Kevin Barnes might concoct after several sunless days sequestered in a studio—its groove is heavier and nastier than any Danger Mouse has cooked up for him in Broken Bells. “Cherry Hearts” and “Fantasy Island” each call attention to themselves with grimy keyboard tones and deep, almost 808-esque low ends. In the past, Mercer has tripped over these kinds of experiments (“Sea Legs” doesn’t feel any less clumsy today than it did a decade ago), but here he lands them with the confidence of an old pro aware of his limitations.

Like many of the indie bands from his era, including fellow pop true believers the New Pornographers and Death Cab for Cutie—one of the few other acts from the mid-’00s indie boom still on a major label—Mercer has survived by staying the course. He has largely resisted trends or any temptation to drift too far from his established sweet spot. The thrill of discovery may be gone—really, it disappeared with Wincing the Night Away—yet it’s remarkable how little rust he’s showing. And although Heartworms never quite conjures the magic of those first couple Shins albums, it’s further proof that they weren’t a fluke. This guy always did, and still does, know how to write a song that sticks.