Almost 40 years ago, a rock-pop band in Great Britain known as Lloyd Cole and the Commotions made their debut in fine fashion, releasing a single, “Perfect Skin,” that reached number 26 on the UK charts in 1984 and an album, “Rattlesnakes,” that reached number 13 and was a favorite of many critics.

Cole, the band’s vocalist and main songwriter, won notice for lyrics that examined the mysteries of attraction and which were also full of literary and cinematic allusions (he’d been a student at the University of Glasgow when he started the band).

The Commotions would go on to release two more albums of what was often dubbed “literate pop” in the 1980s, and all three of their discs were certified gold in Britain. Then Cole left for a solo career in the United States – New York specifically – toward the end of the decade.

Now, in 2023, Cole is still making music, this time in his adopted home of Easthampton, where he’s lived since the late 1990s. His 12th solo album, “On Pain,” is due out June 23.

The album, to be released via the European earMUSIC label, is something of a departure for Cole, now in his early 60s. Though he’s long made guitar-based records, mixing both electric and acoustic models, for “On Pain” he’s mostly swapped his guitars for a synthesizer and programmed sounds.

Synth-based music isn’t totally new for Cole; his 2001 album “Plastic Wood,” for instance, was an all-instrumental disc of ambient music. And on his 2019 album “Guesswork,” he offered eight new songs with vocals, keyboards and some guitar.

“On Pain,” though, is dominated by synthesizer and programming, creating a dreamy, sometimes abstract background against which Cole explores familiar themes and moods from his past music: regret, melancholy, the ups and (mostly) downs of love, a search for meaning, and a bit of sardonic humor.

In press notes, Cole says that he’d previously used a random digital noise generator for creating four long, abstract compositions for his 2020 digital album of ambient music, “Dunst.” He opted to take similar steps for some lyric-based music.

“I decided I’d apply that musique concrète approach to songs,” he says. “And that’s how a lot of ‘On Pain’ was created. The challenge was to make music that I’d want to listen to, a record that might be able to stand next to records that I love.”

“I certainly didn’t set about making something that was going to be quite this intense,” Cole adds. “But I wanted it to be more extreme in all directions: I wanted the minimalist stuff to be more minimal, I wanted the poppy stuff to be more poppy, and I wanted the abstract stuff to be more abstract.”

The title song, the album’s lead track, starts things off with a familiar dollop of regret and self-deprecation; it begins with soaring synthesizer, like a vintage organ in a cathedral, before some percussion and a few darting guitar lines come in.

Love remains a consistently painful subject, Cole sings: “I can’t be trusted with your loving / Look what I did / Every time that you gave it to me / We sing on pain and the untrained heart / The cherub in flight and the poison dart.”

Not a surprise, really, from a guy who titled one of his songs from the mid 1990s “Love Ruins Everything.”

“Warm by the Fire,” the album’s most rock-based track, was released last month as a single, and with its dystopian images of cities aflame and streets full of chaos, it seems right on point in an era marked by climate disasters, war, and bitter, divisive politics.

“We got shopping carts filled / With Chanel and Dior / In keeping with the new order / We took control of the precinct… As we Segway through the smoking avenues.”

Unlike the album’s other tunes, “Warm by the Fire” is driven more by guitar, with a brooding but melodic chorus: “Flames rising / The law hides in fear / Cars burning / Mob surging near / It’s warm by the fire / It’s warmer by the fire.”

Cole’s also known for occasionally slipping references to other songs into his tunes. A couple links to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” popped up in “Perfect Skin,” the Commotions’ first single, and on “Warm by the Fire” he borrows a line from a well-known Rolling Stones song.

“I Can Hear Everything” is built around a steady synth-pop beat, like a song the Commotions might have dabbled with back in the 1980s before putting it aside, but it also offers quieter interludes, with a back and forth between synthesizer and quick, crystaline notes on guitar.

“Wolves,” the album’s long, final track, and songs like “This Can’t Be Happening” are built almost entirely around shimmering keyboards, and with their impressionistic lyrics create a haunting mood.

Indeed, “Wolves,” another single that’s accompanied by a strange surrealistic video, seems to offer another bleak look at modernity, with images of wolves stalking the edges of a crumbling city marked by “This Gothic architecture / This brutality / Your jails and slaughterhouses / Your democracy.”

Cole recorded “On Pain” in what he calls “The Establishment” – his home studio in Easthampton – and he got contributions for some of the eight songs from two of his old bandmates from the Commotions, keyboardist Blair Cowan and guitarist Neil Clark.

According to press notes, Cole edited the tracks, reshaped some of the sounds, and added additional instruments, lyrics and vocals. Joan Wasser and Dave Derby also contributed background vocals, and Cole mixed the album in England with producer Chris Hughes (Tears for Fears, Adam and the Ants, Robert Plant).

Fans of Cole who have followed him over the years – from his rock/pop albums of the 1980s and 1990s, to his more acoustic, homegrown records of the early 2000s such as “Music in a Foreign Language,” to his full-band album “Standards” from 2013 – will want to check out “On Pain” for its different musical approach and the work of a still-sharp lyricist.

And though Cole has always kept a pretty low profile in the Valley in terms of performing – he did play a solo gig at CitySpace last fall, and he popped by Luthier’s Co-op a couple weeks ago – check his website (lloydcole.com) for any upcoming shows. He’s scheduled to do an extended tour in the UK in October with Clark and Cowan in support.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

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