The first time I heard They Might Be Giants was in the late ’90s. The album Flood is the first CD that I have a clear memory of holding in my hands. My dad, the only person I know whose taste in music is more eccentric than mine (he likes opera as much as he likes Seinabo Sey), had just bought the record at the local Borders, and I was clutching the jewel case in the back seat of the family car. “Why is the world in love again?” a chorus of voices sang sweetly and ceremonially in “Theme From Flood,” the album’s 28-second intro. “Why are the ocean levels rising up?” They were singing about doom, but they were singing about joy, too, and in an instant, I was hooked. The next week, my dad and I went back to the store to pick up every other They Might Be Giants album in stock.

The intervening years saw my obsession continue as the band came out with a cavalcade of new albums, including a handful of children’s records that neatly illustrate how They Might Be Giants’ appeal has spanned generations. While the tracks on No! (2002) and Here Come the ABCs (2005) are a little lighter in theme than their “adult” counterparts, they’re still as deeply absurd as anything on the group’s other albums. No! has an entire song sung from the perspective of a broom fed up with sweeping, and Here Comes Science (2009) refers to the human heart as “the Bloodmobile,” a moniker as disturbing as it is cute. Though the arrangements themselves might be comparatively simple, they can be dizzying as they swing from funk to folk. These are children’s albums that don’t patronize their young audience.

On the distribution side, They Might Be Giants has been notably forward-thinking: It was among the first groups to put its music online, selling MP3s on its own site starting in 2004. Then there’s Dial-A-Song, which originated in 1983 as a number people could call to listen to a track in the form of an answering-machine message. The service has offered up some of the band’s most charming recent hits, including the entirety of Glean (2015), a cover of Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills,” and—in anticipation of the new album—the first few singles from I Like Fun. As technology has progressed, Dial-A-Song has developed into a new toll-free number, as well as a website, a YouTube channel, an email-subscription service, and now, in its latest update, a smartphone app.

The band’s sound has evolved, too, but remained firmly in touch with its origins. The inclusion of the song “They Might Be Giants” on the band’s major label–debut, Flood, raucous and strange as it is, was meant to signal that the group was, in Flansburgh’s words, “very much going to carry on as [it] had started—which is to say complicated and impossible to pigeonhole.” Indeed, though the musicians are sonic magpies, with country twangs (“Number Three”) and Baroque vocal trills (“Sleep”) equally present in their work, they’re not exactly genre-hopping—despite influencing artists as varied as Open Mike Eagle and Modest Mouse and “Weird Al” Yankovic. There are no attempts to integrate bass drops or otherwise adapt to what’s trendy at the moment. The band has also literally grown, with Linnell and Flansburgh presently joined by the guitarist Dan Miller, the bassist Danny Weinkauf, and the drummer Marty Beller. All the while They Might Be Giants has continued to experiment (a drum machine was key to 1988’s Lincoln, for example, and Flansburgh and Linnell keep learning to play new instruments) and to explore the eternal themes that have colored the group’s work leading up to I Like Fun.