The existence of Arab Strap always seems fleeting. Half-Told Tales is Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton‘s ninth album, and their third since reuniting in 2016. On it the pair sound in fine form.

Part of this reinvigoration may be down to their heeding the central conceit of Half-Told Tales, which seems to be “seize the day – you may not have another chance”. Sitting at the end of the album is Beats Per Minute, a song which distills the album’s message perfectly. The song finds Moffat addressing the perception of time. A day, he says, is a lifetime for a mayfly. A robin is dead within two years. The light from the moon takes one point three seconds to reach the earth, and we only ever see the past. Over the course of the song, his heart grows and slows and his muscles begin to waste. By the song’s conclusion, he’s intoning “we only have this moment, and it’s already gone”.

This may seem incredibly dour (a word that might as well feature a picture of Arab Strap next to it in dictionaries), but the truth is, throughout Half-Told Tales, the idea of time passing and of the associated decay is frequently offset by an underlying bed of positivity.

You You You focuses in on the personal experience of ageing. Sounding like a mash-up of Candi Staton‘s You Got The Love and a list of middle-aged ailments, Moffat points out his paunch that won’t shift, his hole-ridden shoes and the pills he necks for breakfast to keep things in check. His time is not spent, just killed as he does battle with his own body. Despite all this, he has someone (the you, of the title) that makes it all worthwhile.

The stomping invocation of Glamour Magick casts an acerbic eye over plastic surgery procedures and quackery used to try and reverse the ageing process. Evidently, Moffat’s pumped full of virgins’ blood, covered in cat litter and nightingale shit. On the plus side, his scrotum is rather fetching and it takes years off him. Receiving a similar pasting is the manosphere, which gets short shrift on Be A Man. Addressing the concerns of a parent and the influence of certain influencers on young men, this dainty, piano-led tale still manages to put the boot in perfectly. On asking his son whether he’s heard of the latest “grifter”, Moffat is delighted to hear the response “aye, he’s a prick”. You almost feel the same relief that the protagonist of this story experiences.

Fighting For You opens with a recollection of seeing the nuclear apocalypse TV drama Threads. It’s a story that seems to be a constant for people of a certain vintage. Having seen the film (some of us were shown it at primary school), and being absolutely terrified, Moffat received a similar response from his parents when seeking reassurance: “when it all kicks off, we’re fucking done, turn and face the blast and hope you don’t survive.” Yet he still longs for the good old days of four-minute warnings, mass unemployment, famine and riots while finding time to point out that the have-it-alls are fighting for you from the back of their limos and business class lounges.

Arab Strap always seem to find the balance between savage critique, human frailty, and a strange kind of comforting understanding. Mr Splitfoot recounts a youthful wish to become a ghosthunter, which later becomes an uncomfortable reality; despite the tea and sausage rolls taken in a break during investigations. The spoken-word-meets-piano telling of Under Offer is genuinely devastating. An unrelenting list of tasteless alterations made to an old family home by the new owners can’t help but pull at the heartstrings. Yet, despite the architectural vandalism visited upon those memories, the sketches of monsters that the kids drew on the wall still exist, hidden beneath the wallpaper. The soul might have been stripped away, but the heart remains.

The delicate ballad of Ampersand is perhaps the highlight of the album. Warring partners telling each other to get to fuck might not sound like the kind of thing that could be genuinely emotionally affecting, but in the hands of Middleton and Moffat it is. “Oh well, you never really liked me,” Moffat intones, “well fuck you for all those years you stole”. Underneath the verbal abuse and backbiting is a story of loneliness and love that punches hard.

While Half-Told Tales may be a meditation on age, modern life and the past, it offers hope and resilience. There’s so much going on in these songs that it’s possible to get lost in Moffat and Middleton’s world and barely be able to breathe. With every listen, something new and poignant seems to loom out and squeeze your heart and mind. It’s quite an achievement, and evidence that things can get better with age. Seize the moment. There’s still time to flesh out those half-told tales.