Unusually the press biography accompanying the fourth album by Kim Deal’s long-running sister act is written by a former member, Josephine Wiggs, their first bass player and, to date, the only English Breeder. She tells the tale with affection and detachment, explaining why they played too fast (Deal “didn’t have enough breath to hold the notes any longer”) and why they could never last.

But the band that started out as a drunken offshoot from Deal’s day job in the Pixies are still with us nearly two decades later. With her twin sister Kelley enlisted to sing and play rudimentary guitar, their second iteration temporarily outshone her other band, before disorganisation and heroin did for them. This is only the second release since the 1993 hit Last Splash.

Yet the Breeders remain instantly recognisable. Mountain Battles is characteristically elegant, undercooked and inimitable. It sounds unusual too, warm, dense and treble-free. The opener, Overglazed, is a feminine antidote to the LA pomp most obviously exemplified by Jane’s Addiction. The two-step beats that start Bang On thump so hard and cheaply that you half expect an East London youth to join in, while the stately first single, We’re Gonna Rise, sounds juvenile and resigned.

That rather sums up their occasional sparks of magic. The Deal sisters are now 46. Kelley has swapped her dirty habits for a knitting and embroidery fixation. Kim lives at home, helping to care for their Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother. This belated realisation of life’s realities makes for an unexpectedly vulnerable record.

Purportedly the witty, catchy Walk It Off describes a loser band trying to hold it together, but the temptation to read it as an allegory of the lucrative if creatively irrelevant Pixies reunion is irresistible. The bouncy, haunting German Studies is sung in that language, and the effect is both unsettling and wholesome, which is also true of Here No More’s country harmonies. The title track itself, or at least Deal’s performance of it, seems to hold depths unexpressed in the vague lyric.

Whether Kim Deal imagined herself at this point is moot, but alt.rock goddess to mad auntie is an almost unique career path. This melancholic, warm-hearted collection is a big hug of a record.

(4AD, TMS £10.99)

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