The hoedown is over while the sorrows remain on Mumford & Sons’ decisively transformed third album, “Wilder Mind.” Led by the singer and drummer Marcus Mumford, the band ascended to the arena circuit with foot-stomping songs topped by jaunty banjo picking; it set off a wave of revitalized folk-rock. But with “Wilder Mind,” Mumford & Sons implies that all the old-timey touches were nothing more than decoration. Behind them were the martial beats and inexorable buildups of arena rock, and those have surfaced fully on “Wilder Mind.” It’s an album of mostly despairing love songs that have found an unexpected but fitting outlet: a mope-rock resurgence.

The banjo is gone and electric guitars reign, as announced in the album’s first moments with the keening, distorted solo that opens “Tompkins Square Park.” It’s a move from a half-remembered 1960s to a carefully reconstructed 1980s: goodbye, New Christy Minstrels; hello, U2.

“Wilder Mind” is full of echoing guitars and reverberant space; U2 prevails, while songs also recall Dire Straits, Big Country, Coldplay, Snow Patrol and, more than once, Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer.” Although the album was recorded primarily in London, some songs started as demos at the Brooklyn studio owned by Aaron Dessner of the National. Mumford & Sons and the album’s producer, James Ford, have soaked up the patiently unfolding dynamics and hazy orchestral backdrops of the National’s albums and applied them to a Mumford trademark: the haggard verse heading into the against-all-odds triumphal harmony chorus.

The change of style turns out to be anything but awkward; Mumford & Sons are just as strategic with tiers of electric guitars as they were with their acoustic instruments. The music reaches for the skyboxes, but the songs go one-on-one. They’re dispatches from the throes of one breakup or many: arguments, pleas, accusations, declarations of loyalty and bitter renunciations, often addressed to a “you” that the singer can’t trust and can’t get over. “I don’t even know if I want to believe anything you’re trying to say to me,” goes the chorus of “Believe,” above a phalanx of guitars and drums.