A new Bruce Springsteen album is always an event, and Magic, his first with the E Street Band since The Rising, is no exception. It’s not, of course, the kind of event that you would dress up for: best instead you pull on something checked and work-worn and listen to songs that ring with a hard-earned truth.

After We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions and The Rising’s meditations on 9/11, if Springsteen was any more elder statesmanlike he would be off signing the Treaty of Versailles. Admittedly, Magic can be a little obvious: diner waitresses, long journeys home by the glow of the radio’s dial and men called Sal all appear. Yet there is a grandeur and intensity here that strikes home immediately, Springsteen’s lyrics carried along by the tidal instincts of musicians who have worked together for decades. Springsteen could make a drive to the dry cleaners sound like the Great American Roadtrip. Sure enough, Magic begins with Radio Nowhere and a man lost in the dark of the “American night”. “Driving through the misty rain/ Searchin’ for a mystery train/ Tryin’ to make a connection to you,” he sings, and Magic is all about these missed connections and missed chances, the sense of dislocation that comes when love and morality spin out of control.

His manager, Jon Landau, has said that this is not a political record – aside from Devil’s Arcade, a lament from a soldier’s wife – but Springsteen is drawn to express the heart’s turmoil in terms of global chaos. Last to Die uses the fiery language of regime change to discuss domestic meltdown; Long Walk Home, fuelled by Clarence Clemons’s saxophone, sounds like classic small-town angst, but there is an odd ambiguity to the courthouse flag and the neighbours on the street. Elsewhere, Girls in Their Summer Clothes is a masterpiece of regret, while I’ll Work For Your Love mixes the sacred and profane like a whiskey sour.

You could bite these songs as though you were testing a coin – not one feels counterfeit. As he sings on Radio Nowhere, he is “spinning round a dead dial, just searching for a world with some soul”. It is a lot to ask but once again, Springsteen does his best to fill that void.

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