If you spent some time at a festival last summer, you may well have been exposed to the invigorating spectacle of the Hold Steady. These rowdy thirtysomethings were not the most fashionable group to come out of Brooklyn in 2007, but they were certainly the most ubiquitous. Here were five men who had waited nearly two decades for their chance, and who were determined to make the most of it at an age when most of their bar-band peers were finally contemplating getting proper jobs.

This late-flowering success is, in part, the subject matter of Stay Positive, the fourth Hold Steady album. A snatch of the band's music might suggest they were a good-time bunch in thrall to Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and some old American punk bands. And if you are looking for boozy songs on which men of a certain age “raise a toast to St Joe Strummer”, then Stay Positive will work just fine.

But the album also triumphs on more complex levels. Craig Finn, the Hold Steady's frontman, has always tried to squash a Great American Novel - usually about drugs, Catholicism and wayward Minneapolis adolescents - into each of his albums. Behind the glorious, fist-punching tunes, Stay Positive is his most ambitious yet. This time there are allusions to John Cassavetes films, a couple of unsolved murders and some messy elisions between religion and sex, as well as a sense that Finn and his protagonists may be getting a little old for their hedonistic lifestyles. Artfully, he manages to continue the narrative arc of the previous Hold Steady albums while addressing a pressing new question: how do you retain your dignity and integrity when you are nearly 40 and almost famous?

The answer, it seems, is to make the album of your life. Stay Positive is exhilarating and endlessly provocative. It has songs such as Constructive Summer and Slapped Actress, which will become rumbustious singalong anthems. And, at the end of Yeah Sapphire, it has a lyric that pinpoints how, given faith, this ruggedly orthodox band can reveal themselves to have extraordinary hidden depths: “I was a sceptic at first,” bellows Finn, ecstatically. “But these miracles work.”

(Rough Trade, TMS £10.99, call 0845 6026328)

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