The weird thing about post-comeback Blondie albums is that each one tends to have a different lingering sense of disappointment to it. And where successive releases were too overproduced (The Curse Of Blondie), too unmemorable (Panic Of Girls), or too self-consciously retro-modernist (Ghosts Of Download), No Exit only really suffers in there not being enough signs of how they found themselves again. An attempt to claw out from under seventeen years of absence-driven speculation and the encroaching specter of nu-wave that Shirley Manson and Gwen Stefani were already hinting at, No Exit’s “good for a legacy-act comeback” status seems like it begs praise that’s fainter than it deserves. Treating this album as though they’d never left actually flatters it a bit more — there’s some throwaway crud here and there, but when has there not been when a band’s a quarter century into their career? And since the buzzsaw alt-rock riffs and ska/reggae maneuvers were simultaneously 1999 contemporary and well in keeping with Blondie’s DNA, there’s no need for them to force much of anything here.

“Maria” was the big hit, a guitar-driven UK #1 that made for a convincing slice of relevance in a world that seemed to flail in any direction it could to keep “modern rock” a going concern. But there are other cuts that get deeper to the sly, enigmatic, cool-yet-emotional core of their best songs — check for the existential sincerity of “Nothing Is Real But The Girl” (“You’ll teach her to find out while you’re dying in your living room how much you need her”), the enigmatic physical panic of “Screaming Skin” (an allusion to the autoimmune disease that Chris Stein fought back against during his downtime), and “Under The Gun (For Jeffrey Lee Pierce),” a requiem for the Gun Club’s late, legendary founder — and Blondie U.S. fan club president. Sure, there are moments where the camp on No Exit becomes just a little too much: The title track’s Coolio guest spot on the Toccata In D Minor-lifting title track is somehow dippier than Harry’s rap verse, and if the title to “Boom Boom In The Zoom Zoom Room” doesn’t set your hairs on edge, the caricatured yet harmless burlesque lite-sleaze of the song itself probably will. But even the bigger failures are entertaining ones, and are often easy enough to forgive or at least flatteringly recontextualize (imagine the otherwise baffling alt-country oddity “The Dream’s Lost On Me” in the hands of, say, Neko Case). And they sure as hell didn’t sound old.