The lyrics reflect on memories, hint at characters and offer advice and confessions; they can be hard-nosed, remorseful, flippant, combative or philosophical. The album’s theme, Mr. Pop said, is: “What happens after your years of service? And where is the honor?”

Offstage, Mr. Pop is slighter and calmer than the hyperactive rocker he becomes in concert. His face is lined, his long hair unfussy; he has a professorial pair of eyeglasses. He answers questions thoughtfully, with a clear gaze, an occasional self-deprecating laugh and a vocabulary far more elaborate than the monosyllables that nail down his songs; he quoted de Tocqueville and the French author Michel Houellebecq.

He continued: “In American life, because it’s so hypercompetitive, what happens when you’re finally useless to everyone except hopefully not yourself? What happens then? And can you continue to be of use to yourself? I had a kind of character in mind. It was sort of a cross between myself and a military veteran.”

Mr. Pop, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has long been hailed as the primordial punk rocker for the music he made leading the Stooges in the late 1960s and early 1970s: albums of blunt, forceful, noisy and unimpeachably direct songs that he performed with a fearless disregard for self-preservation; he often ended up bruised, smeared or bloody. He followed those years with an extensive solo career punctuated by Stooges reunions and collaborations with musicians from Green Day to Guns N’ Roses to Best Coast and others eager to acknowledge his influence. Among them is Mr. Homme, 42, who, as the leader of Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age, has been at the center of the so-called stoner rock that emerged from California’s Palm Desert in the 1990s.

Mr. Homme is also a part-time member of Eagles of Death Metal, the band led by his friend Jesse Hughes that was performing at the Bataclan in Paris when terrorists attacked there in November. He had planned to be onstage at that show but changed his plans. “I wasn’t there by a stroke of fate,” he said. “I guess it was my fate to be home and to bring them home. Bad things are like a sunset; they dissipate over time. But this is a long sunset. My dearest friends — how will they un-see that?”