“Stupid.” That’s the word the English rocker Jason Pierce keeps coming back to when he describes how he made the latest album by Spiritualized, “And Nothing Hurt,” due Sept. 7. It has been six years between albums for Spiritualized, the band Mr. Pierce started in 1990, and as he worked on the new record, he often said it would be his last one.

“I push hardest against my own stupidity,” he said in an interview on a visit to New York City. “Every time I make a record, I forget everything I’ve learned about how to make a record. My friends say: ‘Come on, you know how to do this. How many records have you made?’ But it seems like I don’t think of the most logical way to do something.”

Although he has been performing since the post-punk 1980s and has headlined theaters worldwide with Spiritualized, Mr. Pierce, 53, shows no rock-star swagger. Conversing over coffee, across a kitchen table in a Lower East Side apartment borrowed from the owner of his label, Fat Possum, he wore a brash Guitar Army T-shirt with a black-and-white photo of Fred (Sonic) Smith from the MC5. But Mr. Pierce was soft-spoken and self-questioning, earnest about music — his own and, even more so, the musicians he admires, from Buddy Holly to Lee (Scratch) Perry — and he was determined not to make any outsize claims. “More than one person has said I’ve been writing the same song all my life,” he mused.

Spiritualized has always made music that conjures vast expanses, both inner and external. During the 1980s, recording as J. Spaceman, Mr. Pierce was a member of Spacemen 3, a collaborative band that explored drones, riffs and noise on albums like the 1990 “Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To.” With Spiritualized, Mr. Pierce stepped forward as a bandleader and wrapped clearer song structures around his sonic maelstroms.