Black Francis is at a car dealership having his van repaired. It isn’t clear where an interviewer would’ve expected the Pixies frontman to be, exactly, but when he mentions his location over the phone one recent morning, the utilitarian banality of it still registers as a surprise. For the ability to chat while multi-tasking, at least, he praises the prevalence of cell phones and the end of old record-label formalities like not using an artist’s personal cell phone number for an interview. “This is so much more convenient,” he observes.

For all the mythic status the Pixies have accrued since forming in Boston three decades ago, their legend has often been propelled by a straightforward practicality verging on fatalism. Francis, who performs solo as Frank Black but was born Charles Thompson, wanted to form a band, so he and University of Massachusetts Amherst suitemate Joey Santiago dropped out and moved to Boston. They needed a bass player, so they put an ad in a local weekly. When a producer in town saw them perform and insisted they record at the studio he managed, they did. And so on, until they recorded four deservedly acclaimed albums, famously inspired a generation of bands from Nirvana to Radiohead to Weezer, and broke up too soon to reap the dividends—then, in 2004, just as famously reunited for a blockbuster world tour. A similar cool-headed rationality applied to the band’s first album in 23 years, 2014’s Indie Cindy: After playing the same songs on the road for a number of years, it made sense to write new ones.

The wrench in this pragmatic storyline, of course, was the 2013 departure of the person who responded to that fateful classified ad, singer-bassist Kim Deal, whose boiling tensions with Francis are almost as old as the band itself, and who was at the time busy with an anniversary tour for her beloved post-Pixies group, the Breeders. While Francis, lead guitarist Santiago, and drummer (and, later, magician) David Lovering did without a full-time bassist on the three EPs that would become Indie Cindy, their announcement of new LP Head Carrier also officially welcomed Paz Lenchantin, the band’s touring bassist since 2014, as a permanent member. Francis describes Lenchantin—a veteran of A Perfect Circle and Zwan who has also contributed to records by Queens of the Stone Age, Jenny Lewis, Silver Jews, and many more—as not only a great bass player, but perhaps most importantly, someone who jibes naturally with the flesh-and-blood, van-repair-needing humans who make up this lore-enshrouded ensemble. “She’s totally one of us,” Francis tells Pitchfork.

With Head Carrier, due out September 30 ahead of the European leg of another world tour, the Pixies’ challenge is to balance the weight of all this history, and now Lenchantin’s role in it, against more basic realities. Francis says his goal for the record was, simply, “for a listener to be able to remove themselves from the narratives that they might have in their head about the band.” Easier said than done: Already Francis has told BBC 6 Music the album has “a bit of early-Pixies slosh” and compared it to their 1989 landmark Doolittle.

Recorded with producer Tom Dalgety in London from February to March, Head Carrier’s 12 songs are, sure enough, the product of Francis spending more time on songwriting than for other post-Doolittle Pixies LPs. The band’s warped, surrealistic hallmarks are evident, too, both stylistically (bug-eyed screamers, ominously strummy anti-anthems, noise-streaked power-pop, whimsical rave-ups, surf-flecked elegies), and lyrically (Jack Palance lookalikes, tête-à-têtes with haberdashers, Canaanite demons). The album’s title image, a free-associative reference to art that shows decapitated saints literally carrying their heads—where is my mind?—rears its, um, noggin twice here: on the booming opener, also titled “Head Carrier,” and on the penultimate track, the sneakily jangly “Plaster of Paris.”

Meanwhile, the namesake character of “Oona”—on which Francis pleads, “I wanna be in your band”—is “an overlord, kind of like Bennie in ‘Bennie and the Jets,’” he says. (Apparently earlier iterations of the song played up its sexual undertones in more of a “dominatrix” way, though the real-life inspiration for Oona is merely “a private citizen,” Francis demurs.) Then there’s the first song they shared from the album, “Um Chagga Lagga,” which, as a spastic romp with lyrics suggesting European roadside sex work, isn’t particularly welcoming to unfamiliar audiences. Apparently it was UK radio programmers’ choice, to which Francis recalls responding: “Whatever, you’re the guys who are going to play it or not play it, so whatever you want.”

Still, if Head Carrier manages to stand apart from the Pixies’ narrative, it will have to be by adding a new chapter to it. Beyond the sonic echoes of the band’s heyday sits the unmistakable presence of this new bassist, who also lends backing vocals. Lenchantin—whose first tour, in 1997, was actually with Santiago and his then-band, the Martinis—first hit the road with the Pixies following a brief and ill-fated 2013 stint by Deal’s first successor, the Muffs’ Kim Shattuck. While Francis says of Lenchantin, “She’s our sister,” she compares joining the band full-time to her friends’ experiences of getting married: “It does feel different even though it’s like, ‘Well, everything’s the same,’” she says with a laugh.