So the other difference now is sobriety. After some relapses with opiates, Kelley has been clean for eight years, she said, and the partying that dogged other band members has subsided. Seeing Kim “descend into a kind of pop star abyss of drugs and unreliability at the height of her success was pretty depressing,” Mr. Albini wrote, “and that whole deal could have turned out almost infinitely worse, but she came back from the precipice, built a substantial body of work and is making some of her most stunning music right now in full maturity.”

For the first time, a melody came to Kim in a dream. She said she woke with “a dude in my head, singing,” sounding like the synthy ‘80s hit “Tainted Love.” She lost the synth, and the dude, and it became the title track for “All Nerve,” which careens from plaintive to forceful over an insistent rhythm section. After the spacey explorations of “Mountain Battles,” this album is shorter, punchier. Kim didn’t have a grand explanation for the shift: “The fact that we’re playing, is where the meaning is,” she said.

But reuniting post-drugs can also be fraught, said Patty Schemel, the drummer for Hole, who chronicled her own addiction and recovery in a recent memoir, “Hit So Hard” (Da Capo Press). “In my band, getting back into the same room, that old dynamic comes back,” Ms. Schemel said. Musically, too, crutches may remain. “Writing songs, if you’re hitting a wall and you’re not just finding it, getting high kind of helps, in your mind,” she said, “and so you want to fall back into those habits.”

In a second interview without Mr. Macpherson and Ms. Wiggs, the Deal sisters talked about their old ways. Hearing a song arrangement, “Sometimes I think, God, if I could just smoke a nice joint and listen to this, critically, I would be able to identify any inauthentic moments better,” Kelley said. “Then I sigh and think, I don’t know if that’s really true or not. Me wishing for an easier way to do something, doesn’t necessarily make something true.”