In late July, in a brief window between professional appointments, Iggy Pop drove to the mouth of Biscayne Bay, so that he could bob in its tropical waters. In 1995, he had bought what he described as “a very seedy condo” in Miami, and he has had a home in the city ever since. The extremity of the place—it is both environmentally tenuous and aesthetically vulgar—seems to suit Pop, who, in the late nineteen-sixties, as a member of the Stooges, helped invent and refine punk rock, a genre of music so menacing and physically savage that it is sometimes shocking that Pop has made it to the age of seventy-two. After he moved to Miami, he started swimming every day. “I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “I’d go to the beach and come home, go to the beach and come home. I tried to build myself back up from twenty years in harness—New York City, the modern American record industry, gruelling economy touring. I quit smoking here.”

From afar, Pop resembles a bronze statuette. He is lithe, sinewy, and deeply tanned, with a torso that, for decades, has appeared so exquisitely and minutely muscled that an onlooker might reasonably assume it was painted on. In recent years, his midsection has relaxed a bit, but he assured me, while patting it, that it remains quite firm. His hair is blond, shoulder length, pin straight, and parted in the middle, and his eyes are an oceanic blue. Though he has had Lasik surgery—“In Colombia, before it was legal here”—his vision is still imperfect, a malady he chalks up to doing too much intravenous cocaine. He has retained a bit of a round, Midwestern accent from his upbringing, outside Detroit. In conversation, he is nearly guileless, and he listens intently and carefully. Periodically, his face will collapse into a benevolent grin.

He kicked a pair of striped Gucci slides onto the sand. One shoe had been customized with a platform sole, to correct for an inch-and-a-half difference in the length of his legs, a condition he attributes to arthritis combined with an old football injury. As he waded in, Pop told me that he’d once stayed at a Holiday Inn in Tallahassee, missing a Merle Haggard performance in the hotel bar by a day. Earlier, he had suggested that he didn’t know very much about country music, but then he spoke thoughtfully and at some length about the careers of Doc Watson, Hank Williams, and Waylon Jennings, before putting his head underwater and starting a vigorous swim—a mixture of freestyle and backstroke—to a buoy about fifty yards offshore.

Pop is a voracious and enthusiastic student of American music, from the Ronettes and Dave Brubeck to Link Wray and Bob Dylan. Earlier in the day, at a small studio in Coral Gables, Pop had recorded two episodes of “Iggy Confidential,” the BBC Radio 6 music program he began hosting in 2015, after finding that he enjoyed the experience of acting, as he put it, as “a kind of atmospheric bartender.” His broadcasting voice is deep, slow, and pleasantly wobbly. “Comparing my patter when I started the thing and my patter now, I sound nearer and nearer to my expiration,” Pop said. “I sound like Shrek.”

Pop’s selections that morning included songs from contemporary acts such as FKA Twigs, Bill Callahan, Cate Le Bon, and Tyler, the Creator, along with “Hot Chile,” a single that James Brown and his band released in 1960, using the pseudonym Nat Kendrick and the Swans. As a d.j., Pop is good at revealing the connective tissue between seemingly incompatible numbers. After cueing up “Dream Baby Dream,” by the experimental punk duo Suicide, he sat up in his chair and adjusted his spectacles. “Alan Vega, he had rock and R. & B. moves,” he said. “He reminds me a little of Bruno Mars and Sal Mineo.” Between shows, Pop emerged from the cool, dark booth, shirtless and looking for sunshine. “Wanna go outside and warm up?” he asked. He discovers new music for his show by taking the recommendations of friends and opening acts, by reading the shortest, most obscure reviews published in the Guardian, or by looking through the upcoming concert listings published each Friday in the Times. It has kept him awake to the moment.

In early August, the eponymous début album from the Stooges, which Pop helped form, in 1967, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In September, Pop will release “Free,” his eighteenth solo album. “Free” is his most surprising record in decades, and one of his most collaborative. “I began to recoil from guitar riffs in favor of guitarscapes, from twangs in favor of horns, from back beat in favor of space, and, in large part, from the effluent of my own mind and problems, in favor of trying to interpret the poetry of others,” he writes in the liner notes. Two of his writing partners on the album are Leron Thomas, a jazz trumpeter from Houston, and the composer and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate, who records as Noveller.

Thomas wrote lyrics for half of the tracks on “Free,” including “Dirty Sanchez,” a lewd, tense meditation on contemporary sexuality that includes the lines “Just because I like big tits / Doesn’t mean I like big dicks.” “I was thinking, How do I explain to this guy”—Thomas—“that this is career suicide?” Pop told me. “So I wrote him and said, ‘Look, the best thing you can do is put some horn on it.’ That’s my contribution: ‘Put some horn on it!’ So he horned the shit out of it, you know?” Pop went on, “I sang the song once, just for fun, and I thought, you know, Don’t turn into a total fart here. Put that out.” Pop sings the lines with a kind of deranged glee, as if he were trying to get the words out while being dragged off to jail.

David Bowie, Pop, and Lou Reed at the Dorchester Hotel, in London, in 1972. Photograph by Mick Rock

It’s surprising that Pop would worry, even for a moment, about the propriety of a lyric. In the early nineteen-seventies, he was notorious for subverting cultural standards; a concert by the Stooges often included bloodshed, along with the triumphant celebration of one or more perversions. Pop was brutal onstage—barfing, taking his clothes off, dragging furniture or bodies around, slicing his chest with shards of broken glass. In San Francisco, in 1974, he was stomping through the crowd when a fan yanked his briefs down and appeared to perform oral sex on him. Stories about Pop’s misbehavior are lewd, captivating, and plentiful.

But Pop’s work has grown more interior in recent years. The most personal piece on “Free” is “Loves Missing,” a propulsive song about the value of companionship and loyalty. Pop wrote the lyrics. His voice sounds rich and heavy, with a depth and fragility reminiscent of Jacques Brel’s. “Loves absent,” he sings. “The center won’t hold the ends.”

“He doesn’t want to re-tread ground that he’s covered before,” Wayne Kramer, the guitarist and co-founder of the Detroit rock band the MC5, told me. “A lifetime of creativity is a hard job, and he’s a soldier.”