Image Vampire Weekend’s fourth album is “Father of the Bride.”

Almost as soon as Koenig and Rechtshaid fabricate the naturalistic sound of a band, they break the illusion with electronic effects or sudden edits that completely upend the arrangements. (The musicians who played on the album are coyly left uncredited, though guest singers — Danielle Haim and Steve Lacy — are named.) The tracks are playfully, restlessly inventive. “How Long,” with lyrics about attachment, materialism and resentment — “My life’s a joke, your life’s a gas” — starts out with just Koenig’s voice over a bass line and eases into fingersnapping pop-soul, but goes on to toy with bursts of guitar feedback, a distant piano, drums that switch between playing and programming, a pizzicato string arrangement and the comic, metallic boings of a flexatone.

The lyrics are just as jumpy. Encounters with lovers are entangled with thoughts on history, wealth and geopolitics. “This Life,” which goes bounding along on echoes of Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” is a breakup song — mutual cheating — that goes on to consider war and death. “Bambina” worries about coastal storms and police overreaction; its chorus alludes to Christians martyred in Rome’s Colosseum. “Sympathy” — a vigorous burst of pop-flamenco — starts out with a tryst in a bedroom and the desire for a partner, but also muses, “Judeo-Christianity, I’d never heard the words/Enemies for centuries, until there was a third.”

Koenig also — slyly and obliquely — takes on some of the objections that have dogged Vampire Weekend since the band’s self-titled 2008 debut album. The band members were Columbia University alumni singing about affluent, pampered characters while using African-style guitar licks, in songs with blatant titles like “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” Vampire Weekend was tagged as a beneficiary — rather than an observer — of white privilege and cultural imperialism, though that didn’t stop its next two albums from reaching No. 1 in 2010 and 2013.

A pair of cryptic songs midway through “Father of the Bride” are both rejoinders and acknowledgments. “Unbearably White,” a ballad, lists daunting white things — a snow-capped peak, a blank page — and raises the question of who has the right to some narratives: “Sooner or later/The story gets told,” Koenig sings. “To tell it myself/Would be unbearably bold.” Next, in “Rich Man,” he sings, “One rich man in 10 has a satisfied mind/And I’m the one,” leaving it to listeners to judge the level of irony; he goes on to sing about love, money and ratios. The tune is nestled in a guitar pattern sampled from S.E. Rogie, a songwriter from Sierra Leone whose style was known as “palm wine” guitar; Koenig shares the songwriting credit (and thus publishing royalties) with him.