The title of the New York Dolls’ fifth studio album, Dancing Backward in High Heels (on 429 Records), might be seen as a reference to their long-lost penchant for provocateur drag, as seen on the iconic black-and-white-and-pink cover of their 1973 debut. But the phrase also alludes to the grand illusion in which hard work is disguised as effortless grace—being borrowed from Texas governor Ann Richards’ famous quote: “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, she just did it backward and in high heels.” As untold thousands of bands who’ve taken the Dolls as their inspiration could tell you, all that proto-punk passion and strutting ain’t quite as easy as it looks.

On top of all that, there’s a very real sense in which the Dolls are dancing in reverse this time. While their imitators try to recapture the raw essence of their early sound, Dolls mainstays David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain have made some of their own influences more overt, from vintage blues to early-`60s pop. At the same time, producer Jason Hill—best known for his work with the Killers and his own band, Louis XIV—has helped the Dolls craft hard-driving arrangements that are rockingly era-unspecific.

The album’s one cover, Patti LaBelle & the Blue Bells’ 1962 hit, “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman,” is a tipoff to some of the sensibilities at play. But you won’t exactly be mistaking the Dolls for a girl group. Yes, the melodies are sweeter, the arrangements are more sophisticated, and they venture a good distance from their trademark roaring-guitar sound. Yet for all the increased craft apparent in the production, there probably hasn’t been as much pure, unadulterated swagger from David Johansen on a Dolls album since their first personality crisis back in `73.

There could be no New York Dolls song purer than the territorial orneriness of “I’m So Fabulous,” which has Johansen defending his native city against the homogenous numbers crunchers who infiltrate and bivouac in New York, threatening to turn it into a capitalist theme park. “I want sophistication for all the population!” the singer roars. “I want the hip sensation for our civilization!... I’m so fabulous, you’re Las Veg-ias—how do they even let you onto your subway?” Protest songs don’t come any more cocksure. “If the music wasn’t so genius,” says Johansen, “it probably could’ve been a punk-rock song.” Actually, it probably still is.

If so, it’s a brand of punk with more nuance and twists than the Dolls have ever explored on record before. Sylvain’s familiar electric guitar riffing is sporadic instead of omnipresent, with more emphasis on sax and harmonica as rhythm instruments, keyboards in heightened roles, and even strings on a couple of tracks. Lest you think the lead guitarist might have balked at this change of sound, it turns out this musical makeover was largely at his instigation.

“Syl was totally into it,” Johansen explains. “It was just a matter of trying stuff. Somebody gave him a Farfisa, so a lot of the stuff he’d been fooling around with at home had organ on it. We liked the way those demos sounded, and when we got to Newcastle to record, there was a kid over there who lent us a whole bunch of these vintage Paul Revere & the Raiders organs.” When it came to the actual guitars, experimentation was the order of the day there, too. “One thing we used was this Gretsch that’s an electric guitar but has a hollow body. We would put it in front of the microphone without putting it through the amp, just playing it like it was an acoustic guitar, and it made a really, really cool sound.”

The opening sound on the album’s first number, “Fool for You Baby,” is a thundering bass chord, which may be a case of producer’s prerogative. “If some of the songs sound like they’re built around bass, I would imagine that’s because Jason played bass,” Johansen laughs. “Lead bass!” (Hill also joined the band as their bassist on a brief UK tour.) Brian Delaney’s drums also play an even more prominent part in the Dolls’ new wall of sound, thanks to some thunderous experiments. “We were putting up these drums that they had in the attic of this studio, and everybody who worked there was saying, ‘Oh, you can’t play that drum, it’s gonna sound like hell!’ That would really make Jason more determined to drag some huge bass drum downstairs and put a microphone in front of it and see what it would do.”

As for the heightened `60s pop influences, “those are probably always there,” says Johansen, “but they really came through this time, and I think one reason for that is that Jason had Syl singing a lot on it.” While past Dolls records had fairly rudimentary background vocals, “Syl’s singing a lot of doo-wop stuff,” his partner points out, perhaps exaggerating the harmony style ever so slightly.

Asked for a general frame of reference, though, Johansen can’t help but go back even further for his perspective, being the legendary ethnomusicologist that he is. “I like the arrangements on this album because they’re kinda like Lightnin’ Hopkins arrangements, you know? Because you never know when they’re gonna change.” Indeed, Dancing Backward in High Heels is nothing if not shifty—as rocking and earthy as the blues it occasionally references, as otherworldly as the spooky sounds you’d hear coming out of an old AM radio, and as forward-looking as you’d expect from a summit meeting between a visionary band and thoroughly zeitgeisty producer.

Dancing Backward was recorded in England over a three-week period in September 2010. It could scarcely be more different from the album that preceded it, 2009’s Cuz I Said So, either in its ultimate sound or the recording methodology that produced it. That previous release found the band reuniting with their original producer, Todd Rundgren, near his home in Kauai, where he had the band write and rehearse for two weeks, then record the songs as-is, once they’d been practiced to perfection. For the new album, the Dolls encamped with Hill in Newcastle, “this funky old coal town in the north of England,” where it got cold enough to snow during their early-autumn stay. With so many creative epiphanies happening in the studio, they didn’t bemoan the lack of outdoor diversions.

“This time, we were recording from day one,” says Johansen. “We just started putting stuff down and creating in the studio immediately, so that trimmed a week or two off the process. The last record was almost like a live record. On this one, there were a couple that everybody played on at once, but a lot of ‘em, we just kind of built. We were working long hours, but it was a very intensive, creative time. We had a lot of laughs and nothing but fun with it.”

The new record “is different,” says Johansen, “but philosophically it’s the same. I mean, it’s still coming from the same people.” That’s clear from the riotous come-ons in the bakery-and-sex-themed “Streetcake,” where Johansen promises to “give you more sugar than the breadman done,” even as he compares himself to musical heroes ranging from Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels to classical cellist Pablo Casals. “Make me your king, baby/Make me your clown,” he coos in the swinging, T. Rex-esque “Talk to Me Baby.” There’s plenty of the philosopher-poet who fills his weekly XM-Sirius satellite radio show with hilarious soliloquies and pointed harangues, too. Johansen’s advice-for-the-young-‘uns ballad, “Kids Like You,” describes the tear-filled pitfalls of “a big ole existential world/Made just for a boy and girl.” Things get heavier for “a broke doll whose eyes have fallen inside” in the late-night, reggae-like “Baby Tell Me What I’m On.” Moods range from the Gene Krupa-meets-Bo Diddley percussive ecstasy of “Round and Round She Goes” to the closing ruefulness of “End of the Summer,” which, true to its title, belies a hint of Brian Wilson’s bittersweet side.

A cycle comes complete with the inclusion of the first official band recording of “Funky But Chic.” The song became an FM radio hit in 1978 upon its inclusion on Johansen’s first solo album, but it was hard to escape the feeling that it was the Dolls anthem that got away. “It was originally written for the Dolls,” Johansen points out. “Syl and me had written a bunch of songs that we never got around to recording before the band broke up. Everybody tells me all the time that we should (re-)record that song because it could be in movies, it could be in advertisements, it could be in all these places. They’ve been saying that to us for several albums now, and one day we played it and it came out really good, so we finished it up”—simple as that. “It’s a good song!”

The Dolls have now been together longer in their second incarnation than their first. Having first formed in 1971, the group split up for seeming good in `76, two years after the release of their second album, the too-prophetically titled Too Much Too Soon. Therein followed three decades of debate among critics and cultists about whether the Dolls should stay assigned to the glam camp, or whether they and not the Sex Pistols or Ramones really marked the true beginning of `70s punk… or both. Meanwhile, Johnny Thunders died. Sylvain Sylvain carried on with a series of band and solo albums. Johansen increasingly delved into samba, folk, and blues, sometimes under the banner of Buster Poindexter (“Hot Hot Hot”) or the Harry Smiths. There was also that DJ gig and the accidental acting career (Scrooged, Oz).

Fans figured the Dolls were never going to reunite if it hadn’t happened by the turn of the century. But in 2004, rock icon Morrissey coerced the surviving members into getting together for a British festival he was curating, and everything clicked. Original bassist Arthur Kane died of leukemia not long after this heartwarming reunion with his old mates, as chronicled in the documentary I Doll. Even in mourning, Johansen and Sylvain remained sufficiently energized to kick things into the next gear. The Dolls’ first post-30-year-hiatus album, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, came out in 2006 to startlingly pleased—nay, rhapsodic—notices from critics who marveled that the reconstituted crew had recaptured the old fire and expanded the confines of the firepit.

It turns out the main obstacles to a reunion prior to 2004 had been who was doing the brokering. “Usually it was proposed by stubby-fingered vulgarians,” says Johansen. “They were always coming up with these ideas for us: ‘We’re gonna make the record, then we’re gonna go out and do this…’ It always seemed like it would be such a chore. When we actually did get together, it was for a laugh, and we didn’t have any giant scheme or plan. We had so much fun doing it that we said, ‘Oh let’s do it again.’ ‘Okay, let’s do it again.’ Then it took us about a year before we said ‘Let’s make a record,’ so it happened organically. It kind of led us, instead of us trying to force it to be something.”

Seven years after that first Morrissey-hosted summit, Johansen sounds almost surprised to hear himself say: “I like being in a band. It’s kind of… aerobic. And Syl and I have this relationship that is really long and winding, so it’s interesting to see how that evolves. Plus, being out on the road, it’s like you’re in this altered reality. We travel to a lot of interesting places all over the world, and it’s not like the phone is ringing like it is at home all the time, where you’ve gotta see to this and see to that. Touring has a certain amount of structure to it, yet it’s liberating at the same time. I dig it.”

In other words: Becoming the New York Dolls again has turned out to be easier than it looked after all. So maybe they’re really stepping forward into the future in sensible flats… even if their funky-but-chic legend calls for more befittingly glamorous imagery.