The Prodigy are sitting around a table in a King’s Cross boozer, riled by what’s become of rave culture. “Dance music at the moment is so fucking dead,” spits Liam Howlett, still with his trademark Romford Thom Yorke mullet – and still with his trademark venom. “Producers are too safe, they rely on being retro. It’s fucking bollocks. There’s no pushing forward any more.”

“I hate to be the guy that’s like, ‘It’s not like it used to be’, but there is a grain of truth in it,” agrees Keith Flint, chucking back another Jägerbomb (“I can drink,” he notes drily).

Meanwhile, Maxim – the more relaxed of the trio – interjects with the kind of soundbites that music editors dream of. “Yeah, the dance scene has flatlined and we’re the spike.”

It is perhaps ironic that one of the few groups who have a genuine claim to the title of The Greatest Dance Act Of All Time are rejecting the very scene they helped to foster. The early 90s saw the Prodigy hurtle out of the underground like DayGlo goblins, taking boshing breakbeat, jungle and hardcore and mangling them into an abrasive new form of pop music. They were originally derided as a novelty act by dedicated clubbers, but Howlett proved them wrong with 1994’s Music For The Jilted Generation, a complex, powerful record that propelled dance music into stadiums with rock’n’roll swagger. He followed it by switching up their sound, pushing Keith and Maxim’s vocals to the fore, embracing punk guitar, and scoring both a US and UK No 1 with 1997’s rockier The Fat Of The Land. They’ve topped the British album charts with every release since, all the while remaining defiantly punk in their sound and approach.

Keith feels it’s this sense of riotous spontaneity that’s missing from modern music. “Everything’s so commercialised it shuts down the underground,” he continues. “If you’re on an independent record label now, not once do any of those pricks come up with an exciting idea. When we were on XL, they wanted to be dangerous and they wanted to be exciting because we were dangerous and exciting! But now no one’s there who wants to be dangerous. And that’s why people are getting force-fed commercial, generic records that are just safe, safe, safe.”

The Prodigy’s response to this is simple: charge! New album The Day Is My Enemy is loud, obnoxious and violent. Their fizzing, euphoric melodies are still present, but this time they’re pummelled by onslaughts of evil percussion – full-frontal assaults that snarl up the frequencies. Amplifying the sturm und drang, Keith and Maxim bellow over the beats like sailors in a gale. It’s a hard, purposefully brutal listen.

“Violent is the word that keeps on coming up,” says Howlett. “The last album [2009’s Invaders Must Die] was more of a celebration. We’d come back together and were like, ‘Yeah! We’re here, we’re really buzzing!’ Now we’ve come through that stage.” It’s taken them six years, a change of studios, a clutch of false starts and a couple of hard drives-worth of scrapped songs to nail it but, he says, they’ve finally “pinpointed the angry, energetic sound” they want to make.

“I don’t hear anyone out there that sounds like us,” boasts Keith. “They can try but it’s in the sonics, the whole carcass of the song. The way it attacks you is so well engineered. No one else can do that. They don’t have the ability to make that noise.”

In the flesh, Keith proves far less insane than his South-Park-does-Johnny-Rotten stage persona would suggest. He’s eloquent in the manner of a pub raconteur – avuncular, even – pulling me in for a hug when the interview finishes. He’s like a cheeky uncle who likes a tipple and a dirty joke. At one point, he starts talking about the Essex pub he’s bought: “We’ve got an open fire, and I’ve got about 57 quid in a pint pot above it because every time I go and light it, the Firestarter jokes come out. I’m like, that’s very funny, you owe me a pound. So I’ve got £57 going to charity.”

Liam is more cautious, picking his words at first, but is soon trading stories with “Flinty”, while Maxim, the quietest of the three, mediates and clarifies. There’s a real sense of the Prodigy as a unit, the perpetual gang of Home Counties lads facing out against the world. “It’s about us three; we’ve built this over 23 years,” affirms Maxim.

The Prodigy in 1991. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty

Keith nods. “People walk into our environment and we control it.”

It’s an attitude that may help to explain why, despite their long success, the Prodigy have retained their status as outsiders. There are no back-slapping TV chat show appearances, no “classic album in full” shows. Last year, Music For The Jilted Generation – an album that recalibrated the tastes of a generation and turned 20 in 2014 – saw its landmark birthday pass with barely a peep.

Howlett doesn’t want to turn the Prodigy into a heritage band, but he feels that their contribution is too often overlooked. “It’s a bit of a bold statement, but the Prodigy should be seen as an important cultural band,” he starts cautiously, “as important as Oasis or Blur or any of that shit. Britpop was not a culture, as such. I dunno what I’m after … it’s not like I’m after more respect, and I don’t wanna pop up on a few more TV programmes, saying ‘The Prodigy did this!’ I’m just telling people now that, yeah, I think we are important. When you trace the lines back to the Sex Pistols, the Clash, we are in that line.”

While previous releases have been driven by Howlett’s production ear, and packed with guest vocalists and sampled voices, The Day Is My Enemy is the Prodigy working as as a three-piece unit. That doesn’t mean it’s any less spiky, though. “Four years ago we sat down and talked about where the next album was gonna go, and we knew we had to bust out the most ‘band’ album we could create,” says Keith. “We tend to piss each other off, so the process hasn’t all been cuddles and kisses, but that anger we couldn’t summon up back in the day because we were too happy, we’ve got that now.”

That anger is most vividly expressed on the track Ibiza, in which Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson lays into superstar DJ culture over a tumult of clattering beats and sawtooth synths. Howlett is quick to explain the story behind it. “We did a gig in Ibiza,” he snorts, “and I’m not a great fan of the place, but it isn’t an attack on the island, it’s an attack on these mindless fucking jokers that arrive in their Learjets, pull a USB stick out of their pockets, plug it in and wave their hands in the air to a pre-programmed mix. I can’t name names, but our lighting guy pulled out a CD, and said this is blah blah blah’s set, and I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ Turns out that our lighting guy plays it from the front of house while this DJ is onstage pretending to push buttons. Maybe I’m an angry person, but I was infuriated by this laziness. What’s all that shit about? You can’t build a scene around that, it’s never going to last or be credible.” He shakes his head in annoyance. “What happened to spontaneity, man? To a beat that comes out of nowhere, like, ‘RARRRR!’ I still get a buzz off that. So I went out of my way on this record to avoid any of the typical dance music shit.”

He grins, well aware that if the Prodigy were ever to be accepted into the establishment, he wouldn’t be able to keep playing the rebel. “We’re from the proper rave scene, and it needs life breathing into it. But we’re not here to save anything. Fuck that! We’re here to wipe it out.”

The single Nasty is out on 9 Feb; The Day Is My Enemy follows on 30 March