Back in the 1990s Arab Strap were the grumpy old men who gatecrashed Britpop. The Scottish partnership of Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton were still only in their late 20s, but in a world of cheeky chappies in Adidas tracksuits their commitment to gut-wrenching, things-can-only-get-worse miserabilism was commendable – a vision laid out in songs that filtered Moffat’s spoken-word soliloquies through Middleton’s tortured indie-pop.

Thirty years and one lengthy hiatus later, the duo have returned with Half-Told Tales, their finest album since the 1990s. Seeing them square up to middle age like boxers readying for a final bout, it reconnects with the wistful ferocity of their early curmudgeonly classics.

Arab Strap have always been grouses with a trick up their sourpuss sleeves – which is that, when the mood takes them, they can write heartbreakingly beautiful songs about being in love, emotionally tormented and off your face. If it’s possible to be all three at once, then so much the better.

That was the secret fuel that sustained the brilliant Trippy, from 1998, a song about taking bad mushrooms that burned itself out in a shoegaze Götterdämmerung, and, even more so, The First Big Weekend, the best track ever written about being a skint twentysomething with nothing to do but get twatted with your pals.

Half-Told Tales opens with a kick in the form of I Get Noise, where Moffat wends his way through a typically bleak spoken-word monologue about his need to distance himself from a toxic influence (“you overshare and overbear”). Middleton chimes in with the sort of it’s-cheesy-but-I-like-it sax solo not witnessed from an indie band since peak Boomtown Rats.

The feral, frantic energy is a declaration that you’re never too old to get hot and bothered about the condition of the world

The challenge of topping that explosive intro is easily bested with You You You, where Moffat delivers a heartfelt valentine over a pogoing metal-disco beat: it’s like crashing a poetry recital while Metallica soundtrack Saturday Night Fever in the flat upstairs.

None of this is what you’d expect of two grouchy songwriters who were spiritually haggard before their time and who, in their early 50s, are wading into the trenches of midlife. But this is nonetheless an extraordinarily vigorous record that sees Arab Strap upgrade their familiar war chest of jagged, brooding guitars with hair-metal riffs and lashings of saxophone.

But the old melancholy has not gone away: it surfaces on the tender Be a Man, an address by Moffat to his son as he prepares to head into the world under his own steam, to face not just the random cruelty of the universe but also the poison of the manosphere.

“No one else will miss you like I will / no one worries quite like I can,” he croons. As he does so, he captures the poignant pain of watching your children grow up and leave – a universal feeling seldom expressed in music.

Arab Strap paint a fascinating portrait of middle age with this album – one that acknowledges the inevitable rubbishness of getting older but also explores the joy of still having traces of your old joie de vivre left.

That’s the message of the LP’s strongest moment, Fighting for You, a takedown of the far right (whoever they fight for, it isn’t “us”), which sounds like The Prodigy trapped in the quiet carriage of an Irish Rail service and struggling to keep their destructive tendencies to themselves.

The meaning of the song is political, but the feral, frantic energy is a declaration that you’re never too old to get hot and bothered about the condition of the world.

It’s full of zest and zing, but, as with a great night out once you reach a certain age, there’s a price to be paid. And that’s the subject of the record’s comedown track, Beats per Minute, where Moffat reels off the lifespans of all creatures great and small: the robin that dies after two years, the jellyfish that lives forever. He concludes by accepting that all things must pass, even miserable indie bands from the 1990s.

That sense of encroaching darkness ensures that an often exuberant album finishes with a bittersweet ache. He isn’t raging against the dying of the light so much as using what time remains to steady himself and then make one final leap into the mosh pit, all too aware it might be his last.