Kevin Bronson on January 24th, 2019

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In a funny kind of way, FIDLAR’s “Almost Free” is a breakup album. Cue frontman Zac Carper, riffing on the Los Angeles quartet’s new direction:

“I looked at my guitar and said, ‘I’m getting bored with you.’ And the guitar was like, ‘Fuck, dude, I’ve always been there for you.’ And I’m like, ‘Sorry, I gotta move on.'”

Carper exaggerates, of course, but “Almost Free” is a far piece from the party-hearty skate-punk of the Los Angeles quartet’s first two albums, 2013’s self-titled debut and 2015’s “Too.” While in many ways the new album still embodies the acronym from which the band gets its name (Fuck It Dog, Life’s a Risk), it draws from broader musical inspirations— and lobs a few shaken cans of beer at the dystopian morass that is 2019. The wealthy, the gentrifiers, the narcissists, the oppressive technology — all appear in FIDLAR’s crosshairs.

To think that once their biggest concern was that “Max Can’t Surf.” Remember rebellion, 2011-style?

“You were there,” Carper says via telephone last week. “L.A. and the scene were totally totally different. But the world changes, the scene changes, and maybe we grew out of it. I don’t think we could have written any of these songs back then.

“We didn’t have a larger goal in mind then. It was, ‘Let’s get fucked up and make a record,’ although we worked really hard at it. We could have just kept doing that first record every couple of years. We would play Punk Rock Bowling every year, sell out the Observatory every three months … but basically, we got bored.”

||| Watch: The video for “Can’t You See”

With its nods to funk, metal and rap, “Almost Free” minces no words — FIDLAR is as potty-mouthed as ever — yet retains the band’s sense of humor. It’s 13 songs of carefully curated carefree.

“We stopped doing so many drugs,” Carper says, laughing, referencing his well-publicized battles with substance abuse, “and concentrated on getting everything right.”

So horns (“Scam Likely”), harmonica (“Get Off My Rock”) and a pop star (K. Flay on “Called You Twice”) make cameos on the new album. “It was everybody in the band trying different things out,” Carper says of the approach he took with bandmates Elvis and Max Kuehn and Brandon Schwartzel. “We’re a band in the truest sense. If I write a song and demo it to the guys, it goes through the filter. There’s a process. So it got to the point where we’d say, ‘Why not?’ There are no rules anymore. And that attitude kinda had a snowball effect.”

Pulling it all together was producer Ricky Reed, a Grammy nominee in 2016 and somebody who has worked with Twenty One Pilots, Phantogram, Meghan Trainor and Maggie Rogers. “He is so good at picking things to focus on,” Carper says. “In pop, the whole point is to keep it simple — that’s what makes pop great. We had so many things going on, he found what we should zero in on.

“And don’t worry, we’re not going to turn into Maroon 5.”

||| Stream: “Too Real”

The new material has gone over fairly well so far with the “FIDIOTS,” the affectionate term for the quartet’s faithful. They’ve grown up too, although they show no signs of being bored with FIDLAR, past or present. After all, “Almost Free” still has its beer-drenched moments, like “By Myself.”

“I think after eight years some people still expect us to be that party band — you know, slacker punks who just get wasted and play songs,” Carper says. “I get it. But we take everything seriously and work really hard at what we do. You still have people coming up to you after shows offering you drugs and wanting to party. But now it’s, ‘No, I have to work tomorrow.’”

||| Live: FIDLAR plays Amoeba tonight (6 p.m.). Their shows Friday at the Echo and Saturday at the Teragram Ballroom are sold out.

||| Previously: “By Myself”