FIDLAR’s long-awaited third album failed to materialize as planned in time for the late-summer tour with hometown heroes Dilly Dally that sold out Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre this past September, but the delay clearly doesn’t bother the band’s fans.

A mere three months after that last local gig, the punk-ish Los Angeles quartet returns to the very same Phoenix this Thursday, Dec. 13, to headline Indie 88 radio host Josie Dye’s “Holiday Sock Drop” alongside Toronto’s Sam Coffey and the Iron Lungs and D Boy, with its elusive new LP still nowhere to be found.

“This gig is just a one-off and kind of came out of nowhere,” says frontman/guitarist Zac Carper on a garbled conference call with co-vocalist/guitarist Elvis Kuehn that sounds like it might be happening at the bottom of a toilet or a swimming pool. “But in general, Canada has been really good to us. Not only Toronto. Every time we play Vancouver it always goes off, as well. Although Montreal, not so much, now that I’m thinking about it.”

Almost Free, as the new record is known, does at least now have an official release date — “finally,” sighs frontman/guitarist Zac Carper — on the books and will see the light of day on Jan. 25 of next year via Dine Alone Records in Canada. And, as it turns out, it’s well worth the wait. Almost Free is a surprisingly varied and pop-savvy little offering from an outfit that often gets pigeonholed as a wisecracking purveyor of goonish odes to drinking and drugs.

Not that FIDLAR has given up on goonish odes to drinking and drugs — one of Almost Free’s teaser singles is a grunge-damaged monster called “Alcohol,” after all — but the new tunes betray a caustic awareness of the tumultuous political and economic conditions bedevilling contemporary America that suggests a growing level of (gasp!) maturity on the band’s part. Songs like the seething “Too Real” and the Sabbath-esque metallo-stomper “Nuke” definitely capture a certain, rather timely mood of frustration and enraged bafflement at the general idiocy of much modern-day human behaviour.

“It’s pretty easy to get lumped into the ‘party band’ or ‘party rock’ thing, but this is definitely not that,” affirms Carper. “I think that’s just the way things came out. We tour so much that we’ve been able to see the world, y’know, and see what’s going on and it’s pretty wild everywhere with everything going on. It’s not only in America. All this kind of craziness is happening everywhere … It’s not like we went, ‘All right, let’s make a f--ing political song’ or ‘Let’s make a political record.’ There’s not much of a thought process that goes into it. You just, like, think something and say it out loud.”

There’s a polish and an easy tunefulness to a lot of Almost Free that raises the prospect of FIDLAR finding a foothold on mainstream radio, which isn’t all that surprising when one realizes that the producer behind the boards for this one, Ricky Reed, has worked with the likes of Pitbull, Meghan Trainor, Halsey and Twenty One Pilots in the past.

He might seem like an odd choice, but FIDLAR didn’t actually seek him out in a bid to “go pop.” Reed actually approached them, not the other way around. And, in the end, he was the one who finally found a thread through the haphazard storehouse of material the band had been accumulating with no real direction in mind since 2015’s Too.

“I think FIDLAR going with the odd choices is what we usually do,” says Carper. “We did that with our second record, too — we went with, like, a pop-country producer (Jay Joyce). Ricky hit me up to do some stuff and I thought he wanted to work on pop-writing stuff, but then eventually I was, like, ‘Wait, what am I doing here?’ and he said he wanted to work on something with FIDLAR. And I just said, ‘Why?’ ”

“He really kind of brought it together,” concurs Kuehn. “ It wasn’t like we went into a studio and wrote a bunch of songs or anything like that, it was just doing stuff in different studios and our personal studios and on voice memos over the years. It’s just a collection of songs.”

FIDLAR didn’t mean for there to be a nearly four-year lag between albums — indeed, the band had hoped to have Almost Free out already — but it became a victim of its own growing popularity. Demand for its live show is, as Toronto has recently demonstrated, rather high.

“Touring happens,” says Carper. “So we toured for awhile and we were writing during that process and once the songs started coming together we didn’t really have a plan, as far as who we were going to do the record with. And then when Ricky came into the situation, we started piecing together and picking from the collection of songs that we had and then wrote some stuff, too, while going into sessions with him and working in his studio.

“Time goes by pretty fast when you’re touring a s--t ton.”