It's been 13 years since Desaparecidos' previous album and in the time since, Conor Oberst's political conscience has seemed to age in reverse. Payola simplifies colossal, complex systemic issues into an "us vs. them" cage match and the Royal We are up against mostly strawmen and supervillains. This would be an issue if Oberst was using lines like, "Now we're taking it back for the greater good/ Goddamn Robin Hoods" and "Freedom is not free/ Neither is apathy" as a means of convincing listeners to vote in a primary election, draft a persuasive letter to their local representative, or go to law school. But Payola advocates chaining yourself to an ATM, taking a baseball bat to a limousine, and shouting every word at the nearest authority figure. And this makes Conor Oberst a writer of awesome punk rock lyrics.

It would appear that Payola is where Oberst's been storing the splenetic rage that fueled his most compelling work and has mostly gone missing since I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. But while Payola is his most urgent and angry work in a decade, it's by far his most fun record. Because really, it's his only fun record. This is the result of an important shift in a classic punk rock binary. On Read Music/Speak Spanish, Desaparecidos saw themselves in the lineage of the Clash—a fair accusation as Oberst was months away from dropping his Omaha Calling magnum opus Lifted and Desaparecidos would later cover "Spanish Bombs". Their songs were topical, idealistic and had no sense of humor whatsoever. Often singing in the same whole-body quaver as he did in Bright Eyes, Oberst led you to believe these songs saw themselves as the actual solution to the suffocating, transactional nature of marriage, a spiritually broken American military, and the overabundance of Starbucks in Omaha.

Payola is a discovery of their inner Sex Pistols: more cynical, more in character, taking advantage of no-win, no-future situations to create potent, punk rock theater. Up against institutions too big to fail but also too big to defend themselves, Desaparecidos provide heavy ammo for cathartic finger-pointing and maximum collateral damage.

Though Oberst is largely responsible for Desaparecidos' profile, this is not his side project—this is a full-on band and one that has grown increasingly tight and versatile despite only intermittently existing in the 21st century. Infamously recorded in a week of chaotic sessions, Read Music/Speak Spanish played out like a demolition derby, riffs, corroded shouts, and clamorous drums careening into each other. Payola is fast and furious, but carefully engineered for maximum, straight-ahead velocity. Despite the professed influence of the Cro-Mags and T.S.O.L., Desaparecidos are not a convincing hardcore act. Most of their arsenal draws from pop music, New Wave or even metal—Oberst's major-key, happily resolving melodies would've fit into his folk songs while Denver Dalley gilds the edges with tapping solos and ingratiating call-and-response riffs with keyboardist Ian McElroy.

Regardless of its throwback sonic inspiration, Payola sounds far more contemporary than Read Music. So So Glos appear on "Slacktivist" and provide context for the harmonized guitars and beer-muscled pop-punk. Meanwhile, Against Me! has always balanced their most affecting, crucial work with potent sloganeering, so Laura Jane Grace is a perfect accomplice to piss on the Wall Street frat houses during "Golden Parachutes". It's hard to say whether Desaparecidos have truly influenced similarly minded, popular punk acts who have emerged in their absence or vice versa, but it lends Payola a current vibrancy that Read Music avoided—Patrick Stickles has been saddled with Bright Eyes comparisons from the get-go, and now that he's making compact rages against the machine like "Dimed Out", he's a real-time competitor with Conor Oberst's band. Meanwhile, "Te Amo Camila Vallejo" imagines if Joe Strummer had the foresight to write a Japandroids song, a pound-the-steering wheel anthem about going to the ends of the Earth for a charismatic, beautiful woman. In this case, it just so happens to be the "World's Most Glamorous Revolutionary", a Communist leader of Chile's 2011 student uprisings and now an elected member of congress.

But as with Strummer or any political writer who tries to give voice to people outside of his own demographic, Oberst could be accused of being out of his depth (not to mention the question of whether their name brings light to a terrible situation overseas or is being utilized for its cachet). It would take a very willful misreading to accuse Desaparecidos of misappropriation—"Radicalized" split screens a potential Islamic extremist and an American mourning his fallen brother in a double wide trailer, and it's not attempting the depth of Steve Earle's "John Walker's Blues"or even the bite of Desaparecidos' own "The Happiest Place on Earth". This juxtaposition is built upon by the thematically linked "10 Steps Behind", presumably inspired by a religious tradition of requiring wives to trail their husbands. The imagery in "10 Steps Behind" remains intentionally vague—is the subject from the Middle East or Middle America? Do both cultures see women as property in their own way?

As with "Radicalized", the seething anger underlying "10 Steps Behind" is better conveyed through the blistering music and Oberst knows when to get out of the way. And mostly, chucking any pretense of nuance works in Payola's favor. When discussing the policies of celebrity racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the beneficiaries of the Wall Street bailout, or a cancer patient whose life is going to be determined by paperwork, these songs seem to ask, do you really need to hear both sides?

Whether or not Payola was "worth the wait" is a moot point—not much about Read Music/Speak Spanish suggested a follow-up was ever going to happen at all, so who was waiting really? But Payola's weaker points are entirely due to its latency period: by the time "City on the Hill" had debuted, exactly half of this record had been publicly available. Every song here is effective and memorable, just some less so than others, and most of them are packed towards the end, repeating earlier ideas ("Von Maur Massacre", "Anonymous").

And a topical record that's been cobbled together over the span of five years is going to sound dated in a 24-hour news cycle. It's not just the references to Occupy or the NSA's Fairview surveillance system or flashmobs, though those tend to jut out like 2012 RT's on your timeline. There's an Auto-Tune joke buried in "Backsell", but also a warning from former big league washout Britt Daniel, whose A&R-ripping "The Agony of Laffitte" single made him and Oberst short-lived labelmates on Saddle Creek. Since the release of "Backsell" in 2012, however, Spoon has signed to a major label started by a former Warner Bros. executive.

Then again, Read Music/Speak Spanish was written and recorded shortly after 9/11 and while it captured the spirit of its time, it actually proved to be prophetic—though criticized for its maladroit lyrics at the time, it (however clumsily) pledged feminist allegiance, fretted over the overinflated housing bubble and a war with no end in sight. The outlier was "Mañana", a desperate rallying cry where Oberst hoped against hope that humanity could create a new future rather than an increasingly shittier version of the past. They played it at their first reunion show in 2010, a benefit to oppose a Fremont, Neb. renter's ordinance that blatantly targeted the influx of Latinos into the town by requiring an oath of legal citizenry. The U.S Supreme Court declined intervention and a headline detailing its current status perfectly sums up Payola's reason for existence: "furor persists."