After putting so much effort into ignoring their first three albums during their productive run of material released between 1987 and 1991, Wire likely caught a few listeners off guard by starting off 1991’s The First Letter with a loop of the opening guitar crunch from Pink Flag highlight “Strange.” Yet it’s stuck in that tense chug, ultimately forming the backbone of beat-heavy industrial dance track “Take It (For Greedy),” standing alone as the sole, elusive piece of their own history that Wire bothers to touch throughout this idiosyncratic cap on their second phase.

It’s easy to read the inclusion of this self-referential sound bite as nothing more than cheek, just as their few seconds of “12XU” shows up on Document & Eyewitness as little more than trolling their audience. But it can also be interpreted as nostalgia; drummer Robert Gotobed left the band (temporarily) after the release of 1990’s Manscape, and the band decided for the sake of The First Letter to drop one letter from their name — indicating that they were now a trio (note that the W in “Wir” looks like a three). And thus, Wire became Wir.

Yet while the band acknowledges their past for the first time in years on The First Letter, as a whole it’s about the band moving forward, and fully embracing the arty machine-pop direction they had been working toward. But The First Letter mostly succeeds where Manscape failed. The songs, while more explicitly engineered for dancefloors, are more fully realized than those on their last two records — which shouldn’t have been too much of a challenge, considering The Drill is a series of variations of the same idea. But there are some genuine standouts, including “Take It,” two dreamy and beat-driven versions of “So And Slow It Grows,” the ominous darkwave tones of “A Big Glue Canal,” and the surreal factory throb of “Naked, Whooping And Such-Like,” which opens with a spoken-word reading from singer and writer Claude Bessey.

It might have been interesting to see where Wire — or Wir, rather — could have taken this sound had they pursued it even further later on in the ’90s. Instead they went dormant for nearly a decade, only to start fresh in a new decade, with yet another new approach.