Wire might not have always been interested in acknowledging their own history — we all heard what happened when the rowdy punk crowd on Document & Eyewitness wanted to hear “12XU” — but they’re keenly aware of it. When they’ve ignored their early records, as they did in the ’80s, it was in an effort to redefine what Wire could be, even if the act itself seemed like a stubborn dismissal of some of the best work they ever created. By contrast, when the band restarted again around 2000, it was everything between The Ideal Copy and The First Letter that ended up on the no-fly list. 

The group — once again featuring all four original members — recorded a pair of EPs titled Read And Burn (the bulk of which ended up on Send), and began performing live again. But most telling of all about this new act was that songs from Pink Flag once again found their way into the setlist. In fact, if there’s an album in Wire’s catalog that their 2003 comeback Send resembles most, it’s Pink Flag. But it’s also a fairly weird, modern reinterpretation of Pink Flag. The tracks pummel and explode with machine-gun industrial beats, which at the time sounded unusually harsh. As much as Send sounds like classic Wire, relatively speaking, there are times when it sounds even more like a Ministry album.

And, you know, that’s actually not such a bad thing. Coming from a group of 50-year-olds, Send is a bold statement, but one that yielded some surprisingly strong material. The machine-punk production is a bit of a Trojan horse, however; for as heavy as tracks like “In the Art of Stopping” and “Mr. Marx’s Table” sound on first listen, they’re more nuanced and layered than they seem, almost shoegaze-like in their rich beds of distortion. Colin Newman and Graham Lewis bark with more ferocity than they have in ages, and it’s safe to say that there’s no Wire album that sounds quite as bass-heavy as this one does. Which makes it all the more rewarding to find the humor and lightheartedness in upbeat punk songs like “Comet” (the chorus goes, “And the chorus goes/ And the chorus goes/ b-b-b-b-b-bang“) and “In The Art Of Stopping,” which uses its title as a cue to drop to a complete silence for a full second. It’s not simply the fact that Send sounds more punk than its ’80s and ’90s predecessors that makes it superior; it’s the fact that, for the first time in years, Wire really sounds like they’re having fun.