De La Soul have been positioned as everything from young hippie weirdos to aging, jaded scolds in the face of their more hardcore contemporaries. But the truth is that they’re just smart, grounded wiseasses whose eccentricities alternately hid or let slip their everyman status. If the clean-cut white yuppie who came in for U2 and came out with De La Soul was positioned semi-ironically at their start, their current position as elder statesmen of rap comes from their crossover eclecticism fine-tuned into a true-to-self versatility. They began showcasing a post-genre adventurousness in the ’80s, opened doors for alt-rap’s next wave in the ’90s, and spent the first half of the ’00s getting Damon Albarn, Chaka Khan, and Carl Thomas to share iPod space. Then they vanished.

Calling De La Soul’s hiatus a disappearance isn’t that much of an exaggeration: In their absence, the new record industry streaming model turned their history of innovative sampling and cultural interpolation against them, and the clearance and rights issues that locked them out of digital distribution posited them as one of the most important, and possibly the last, true holdouts of the CD era. But they had to keep their name out there somehow and found a way around the record business unable to maintain their legacy by funding their music through Kickstarter, just like regular folks (albeit more than $600,000 above most regular folks’ goals). They’ve also come to a phase in their career where an artistic existential crisis is scraping up against the getting-old anxiety that the rest of their Gen X peers are making a big public deal about. And working through that on record might be their most down-to-earth move yet.

*and the Anonymous Nobody... *is their first album since 2004’s The Grind Date, which featured a still-prolific MF DOOM, a still-peaking Ghostface, and a still-living J Dilla. This one features an equally notable and telling guest list: there’s David Byrne organizing an art-neurosis summit on “Snoopies,” there’s Damon Albarn turning “Feel Good Inc.” inside out on “Here in After,” there’s Snoop Dogg (“Pain”) and 2 Chainz (“Whoodeeni”) and Roc Marciano (“Property of Spitkicker.com”) mastering their own cool, dad-jokey versions of Over-35 rap to go along with De La’s version. Their dozen-year absence and the fact that Pos and Dave and Maseo are all going to hit 50 before the decade is out looms over all that, and it turns a comeback story into more of a claim to their legacy.

It’d be easier to shake off that feeling if there was more of a kick to this record. If your impression of “old man rap” is short on energy and long on reflection, this album won’t change that. At times, *Anonymous Nobody *feels more like a matter of necessity than enthusiasm, even if the work put into it proves it’s not. When it sounds tired and bummerish, it’s more in keeping with the hazy enervation of contemporary Drake-casualty rap than the proto-backpacker energy of their old joints. And while their casual, collected deadpan was always key to their delivery, Dave and Posdnous aren’t so much rusty as they are restrained in their down moments, all heavy eyelids and middle-distance stares. The flow’s still there—Pos remains way underrated in terms of disjointed, unpredictable rhyme schemes, and Dave still has a way of injecting that characteristic “huh, how about that” understated sharpness into his words—but the energy’s more stoic than ever.

Which makes sense, given the thread of tribulation and frustration that cuts through Anonymous Nobody, likely their bleakest record thematically since Stakes Is High. All the relationships they bring up seem to have been doomed long ago. “Drawn” and “Memory of... (US)” is all about trying to persist through faded love, depicted damningly as a metaphor for music-biz struggle. When they’re telling ass-chaser tales like “Trainwreck” or Dave’s verse in “Whoodeeni,” it’s all so tenuous that they have to bring in a 67-year-old man character in for an interstitial skit to remind them they need to get less reckless about hookups. If that sometimes lends itself to dated tropes—a “morally pure but naive young girl comes to the big city and gets corrupted” rap like “Greyhounds” sounds bad coming from a bunch of middle-aged dudes, even if one of those dudes is Usher—that's a side effect of dealing with accumulated experience.

There’s still no questioning De La’s greatness with observational abstraction. “Royalty Capes” isn’t just a juxtaposition of opulent-kingdom metaphors and gimme-what’s-mine industry beef, it’s the best type of convoluted wordplay: “I choke the blood out of felt tips/Heavyweights up to the front if the belt fits/The wealth is like ivory toothpicks/One out of each tusk/And must gets bust for each and every hiccup.” And “Pain” runs through its weary streak with been-there resilience, as if to say that if this shit’s a constant, it might as well be your inspiration.

There’s unexpected power in that weariness sometimes, but at low points, the big sinking weight of this record is their laconic flow and beats rarely make a case for themselves. At least when they had to tread water back in the day, they had a danceable electric piano hook to do it over. The live-band production and original musical composition is a good juke around any worries about sample rights, but too often the Rhythm Roots Allstars either keep it a little too tasteful (“Greyhounds” aims for the Miguel/Frank school of sumptuous future-soul and lands in a mattress commercial) or swing at pitches in the dirt (the arena rock of “Lord Intended,” featuring the Darkness’ Justin Hawkins, is easily the most inexplicable thing De La’s ever done). Pete Rock and Estelle just manage to bring that glow to “Memory of… (US),” but when it takes one of the greatest producers ever and an actual Crystal Gem to make a cut sound alive, it’s easy to wish the rest of the album had more to work with.

Fortunately, the tasteful outnumbers the ridiculous throughout the record, and if you don’t expect tectonic shifts in the way live-band hip-hop beats sound, the cumulative effect is at least thoroughly pleasant. And sometimes thoroughly pleasant plus heavy bass is just what you need. And when the energy level spikes on the late-album P-Funk homage “Nosed Up,” it’s live enough to distract you from wishing there was more of it. It’s all kind of what a skeptic might expect from hip-hop’s most enduring outsiders coming to terms with finally being outside the youthful drive that helped break them in the first place. Middle-aged rap has rarely sounded more grown, with all the mixed-blessing perspective that comes with it. *Anonymous Nobody *is kind of a downer, but sometimes that’s what you need, especially when the optimism’s just below that melancholy surface. If De La can find their place again after being gone so long, those clouds have got to break eventually.