Self-titling your fifth album sends a signal. The glad tidings are that No_One Ever Really Dies is not one of those rock fusions NERD have made in the past just to prove how versatile the production duo of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo (and their childhood friend Shae Haley) could be.

NERD are not only back, for the first time since 2010’s Nothing album, then, but relevant – political, even, in marked contrast to their slinkier incarnations. You get the impression that, however huge a hit Happy was for Williams, there was a desire for him to make some beats that could in no way soundtrack a children’s film. There is a strong Yolo bent, redolent of Pharrell’s Skateboard P days, to No_One Ever Really Dies. One track, Don’t Don’t Do It!, even breaks into something like ska. This is a brash, busy party record with its eyes wide open, in which the NERD brand is thoroughly refreshed.

Rhythms and visuals to the fore, the tracks that have emerged thus far are the album’s more ferociously direct. Featuring Rihanna rapping bars – a first – the lead-off, Lemon, cribs from trap and the kind of pristine dewdrop beats NERD, the Neptunes and Pharrell solo have previously deployed in their more minimal phases.

Another A-lister, Future, is front and centre on the banging 1000 – a deranged new wave take on trap, whose rich video churns through recent riot footage, the Dead Kennedys (“Nazi redneck assholes fuck off!”) and some fierce formation dancing. By contrast, the equally fraught Rollinem 7’s hauls fellow funky elder statesman André 3000 out for a verse.

The rest of the track listing barely finds time to catch its breath. The funky, sassy ESP, one of the relatively few guest-free zones, is begging to be a single. It is one of many tracks whose good-time sounds carry with them nods to recent times. The “mad ethnic” sample stitched into Lemon, cribbed from a Twitter video in which a New Jersey rapper called Retch films himself smoking a blunt and shouting out to Martin Luther King, surrounded by bemused white onlookers, recurs again on ESP.

At the album’s first playback in California, Williams explained that the title of Don’t Don’t Do It! (which also features Kendrick Lamar) quotes the wife of North Carolina police shooting victim Keith Lamont Scott as she pleads with officers for his life, recording the incident on her phone.

Musically, NERD are not short of things to say either. The only hitch is that sometimes, a surfeit of ideas all turns up on one song. Pairing Lamar with MIA is inspired, but their track – Kites – deserves to be a killer, rather than a kitchen sink overflowing with spare genres.

Another fly in the ointment: it is unclear how much Chad Hugo (or, indeed, Shae Haley) was involved in No_One Ever Really Dies. It sounds – overwhelmingly – like Pharrell’s show. Ultimately, though, this is an album full of what another killer track – Secret Life of Tigers – calls “serotonin overload!” – a flow-state that not even a perky reggae track featuring Ed Sheeran (Lifting You) can dim.