Fast-forward Of Montreal trip into the future BY SIMON W. VOZICK-LEVINSON

Shortly after forming in 1997, Of Montreal staked out a position on the fringes of the Elephant 6 psych-pop camp. They were the scene’s merry fools, pushing their retro routine toward twee vaudeville shtick. In 2004, the last of several line-up shuffles left chief jester Kevin Barnes to write and record Satanic Panic in the Attic (Polyvinyl) mostly by himself. The disc was hyped as a great reinvention, but Barnes’s MO remained pretty much the same. So the full-on synth-and-glitter wonderland of OM’s seventh full-length — again an all-but-solo effort by Barnes — came as a surprise. Behind the curtain of cheery wordplay and character sketches of The Sunlandic Twins, a jittery, glammed-out dance-floor fiend had emerged.

Barnes chalks up his sudden case of Saturday-night fever to boredom. "I’ve done the ’60s thing so much that I’ve burned out on it," he tells me over the phone from his home in Athens a couple of days before setting out on a tour that’ll reach the Middle East this Sunday. "For a while, I wanted to make records that sounded like they were made in 1967. I wanted this to sound like it was made in 2015."

It’s a disco future. "I thought it would be fun if I could write a song that, when it came on, people would start dancing and go crazy." And at least half of The Sunlandic Twins’ 13 tracks make that grade — in particular "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games," "So Begins Our Alabee," and "Oslo in the Summertime." But Barnes contends there are personal messages among the drum-machine clatter. Previous OM albums featured quirky personae, like the fictional small-town residents ("The Autobiographical Grandpa," "Fun Loving Nun") who peopled 1999’s The Gay Parade (Bar/None). "I was sort of guarded," he says of those songs. "I was impacted by some negative reviews I read of the band — I thought, if I’m writing these songs that aren’t about me, then I won’t be offended if people don’t like it. But then I realized that was just a defense mechanism. I was feeling like I wanted to reach out more and share more with people."

The Sunlandic Twins is peppered with dear-diary lyrics. "You freed me from the past/You fucked the suburbs out of me," he crows on "The Party’s Crashing Us Now." Barnes got married in 2003, and an unswerving belief in the healing power of love runs through the album. It closes with some of the least complicated lines he’s written: "Don’t feel sad, ’cause it’s a violent world/But there’s still beauty/I’ll take care of you if you take care of me."

Yet the album also includes "Forecast Fascist Future," a patchwork of squealing guitar lines and surreal imagery. The leanest rocker on the album, it’s almost indecipherable. When I ask about that title, though, he begins chattering about an Orwell-in-the-sky-with-diamonds back story where a hero is "taking his lover from the Earth and escaping with her, but their future’s really uncertain. All they know is it has to be better than what they were forced to live with before."

On the music side, he effects a risky escape from Elephant 6 retro fetishism. Did he have some overarching plot arc in mind as he pieced together the synthetic beats? "It’s funny, because my brother and I, when I was finished with the record, we sat outside and we were talking about it. We created a concept about it. In my head it existed for about five minutes. But then somehow it just evaporated in my mind."

Of Montreal + the Management | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | Sept 11 | 617.864.EAST