Of all the bands to emerge from the hipster hotbed of Brooklyn in the 00s, few were as fiercely, unblinkingly strange as the Dirty Projectors. In the nine-year run spanning 2003’s The Glad Fact to 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan, the “amphibious vehicle” of Connecticut native Dave Longstreth has tried its hand at glitch operas about country rock stars, heretical ‘reimaginings’ of classic punk records drawn from memory, and concept albums about whales. With Björk. But on his seventh album under the banner, Longstreth didn’t have so far to look for inspiration.

“It started in the midst of it,” says Longstreth of his writing for the self-titled album, a rollercoaster account of his split from girlfriend and collaborator Amber Coffman, and the depression that followed. “The experience you hear on the record is the arc I went on through in the process of making it. It begins kind of shattered and depressed, and then you go through these various emotional states and wind up with something like acceptance and reconciliation at the end.”

Longstreth makes no attempt to mask the clutter of conflicting emotions on the record. On “Little Bubble”, a lovely, cooing lullaby sung from the depths of despair, Longstreth intones, “I wanna sleep with no dreams / I want to be dead.” And on “Keep Your Name”, the sound of wedding bells gives way to a wounded croak from Longstreth, bathed in AutoTune, who complains of feeling abandoned before crooning the line, “what I want from art is truth, what you want is fame” – a not-especially veiled swipe at Coffman’s career away from the band, which has to date included guest spots with Major Lazer and Snoop Lion.

It’s a low blow in a song that flits between feelings of self-reproach and recrimination, but Longstreth says the lyric should be understood in context. “I did sort of wrap that line in a package of, ‘Oh shit, shots fired!’ Like a rapper,” he says. “But I think there’s a lot going on emotionally in that song. It’s a dispatch from that emotional state where you’re feeling all sorts of mutually contradictory feelings at once.” Either way, it makes for a stark contrast with Coffman’s own debut solo single, last October’s “All to Myself”, in which the singer seems to guard against exactly this sort of introspection: “I can’t just sit around feeling upset / dwelling on my loneliness.” (Her forthcoming solo album, City of No Reply, was produced by Longstreth, suggesting that the pair are now reconciled.)

Coffman’s part in the Dirty Projectors’ story is an important one. Joining the band on 2007’s Rise Above, her vocal gymnastics had become part of the band’s DNA by the time of 2009’s Bitte Orca and its follow-up, the sweetly bucolic Swing Lo Magellan. (On one of the new record’s more upbeat moments, “Work Together”, Longstreth pays tribute to their creatively fruitful relationship: “Maybe love is competition that makes us raise the bar – we better ourselves.”) Coffman’s melismatic vocal style also reflected the group’s career-long embrace of R&B, an underlooked aspect of the Dirty Projectors that marks them out as something of a bellwether band for indie rock’s evolution into the current decade.

“For somebody like Kanye, fame is the fullest realisation of his art in a way... it’s like an Andy Warhol dream or something” – Dave Longstreth, Dirty Projectors

Speaking of which, Longstreth seemed unimpressed with the state of much contemporary indie in a post on Instagram this month, dismissing it as “both bad and boujee... refined and effete, well removed from the raindrops and drop tops of lived, earned experience”. But if that’s true, we should also acknowledge that the Dirty Projectors’ own story is tied up with the story of gentrification in Brooklyn. Their first album, 2003’s The Glad Fact, was released in the same year Williamsburg author Robert Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook took the hipster meme to the world, and their songs – teetering, lop-sided creations liable, at any given moment, to take a screeching detour into prog rock, noise or Ghanaian highlife – wore their erudition on their sleeve. This was a mannered, consciously progressive sound that spoke, along with other Brooklyn habitués like Grizzly Bear, Gang Gang Dance and Animal Collective, to the changing face of a borough till then most famous for its rappers. It’s an irony not lost on Longstreth, who sneaks no small amount of guilt into a line on “Winner Take Nothing”, where he compares his ex to a property developer, “turning up the waterfront for condos and malls.” (Brooklyn’s waterfront has been at the heart of the debate about gentrification for more than a decade now.)

“A lot of the music I was inspired by growing up – college rock, DIY, what they used to call indie rock – has a value system where truth-telling and authenticity are oppositional with mass media, showbiz, and commerce,” says Longstreth, adding that his work over the past few years with artists such as Rihanna, Kanye West, and Solange (who returned the favour with a co-writing credit on “Cool Your Heart”, a breezy standout from the record) helped his views to evolve.

“For somebody like Kanye, fame is the fullest realisation of his art in a way,” says Longstreth. “It’s like an Andy Warhol dream or something. He’s able to marshal all of these different artforms and media into his story, in this very layered, idiosyncratic way. And (it’s interesting) how that relates to storytelling about individuals, about the communities in our culture that are portrayed dimensionally, about who gets to be a full sculptural bust and who gets to be a cartoon.”

On Dirty Projectors, that thorny question resolves itself on the last track, a valedictory dirge called “I See You”. In the song, Longstreth finally learns to stop projecting his feelings of rage and sorrow on to his ex, and instead sees the person that’s been standing there all along. As Longstreth says, “We’ve all been through these things, everyone knows what these feelings are. There’s something reassuring about that.”