Few are the bands who get to inspire an iconic tabloid headline in their lifetime. The morning after their Today programme appearance in 1976, the Sex Pistols managed to do it when the Daily Mirror shrieked “The filth and the fury!” Two decades on, with the release of Firestarter, the Prodigy also managed it. Trumpeting “Ban this sick fire record”, The Mail on Sunday went all out to stop the Prodigy in their tracks. Instead, this tabloid vilification had the unexpected effect of allowing the rave outfit, born in Liam Howlett’s Essex bedroom at the beginning of that decade, to make their mark on the social fabric of this country.

In the process though, it seemed to cement their self-image as paid-up pop insurrectionists and duly drained all the sense of fun out of their music. The descent into self-parody was summed up by a run of titles that ran from Smack My Bitch Up to Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned in 2004. Would it really be so bad if Howlett dropped the agenda and allowed himself to make, as the writer Simon Reynolds once memorably put it, an album of “hyper-hyper bubblegum nuttercore for E’d up pop kids”?

At last, it seems to be a question that Howlett has come around to addressing. On Invaders Must Die, the group’s creative linchpin has proceeded at speed from the premise that no idea is too obvious if it feels right. It takes 30 seconds for the first Proustian rush of the title track to descend upon you, with a circular seven-note motif that presages the imminent arrival of supersized bass and drums. If not quite Dorothy realising that Kansas wasn’t so bad after all, the sound of a sampled voice declaring “We are the Prodigy” is tantamount to Howlett finding his inner Braintree.

At times, you find yourself smiling incredulously at the shameless glee with which his own “best bits” over the years are referenced. If you joined the brand new Warrior’s Dance with No Good (Start the Dance), from 1994, it would — replete with helium vocal — be like sticking together two pictures in those “endless landscape” postcards.

Just as Out of Space once retooled an old Max Romeo vocal in a futuristic setting, Thunder also borrows from an old reggae tune (an obscure cut by the Brentford Allstars, resung by the guest vocalist Brother Culture). As a man whose place in the speeding car of rock is akin to that of a dog next to an open window, Dave Grohl is a fitting cameo on Run with the Wolves, marshalling a four-minute percussive landslide while Keith Flint issues some suitably portentous nonsense over the sound of sirens.

After the tortuous gestation of recent albums, what strikes you at every turn is how very effortless it all sounds. Up to and including the widescreen digital dawn chorus of Stand Up, the album works at a basic irreducible level, as all great pop does. You hear it once, and you want to hear it all over again. It is, quite simply, the big, brilliant, dumb rave album we have secretly wanted them to make for the past ten years.

(Cooking Vinyl, TS £10.76)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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