I haven’t seen it in person, but from what I read, the album art for Deerhoof’s new Friend Opportunity makes a lot of sense. Each CD is packaged with 12 different “covers” for the liner notes, each cover a painting by David Shrigley. The paintings are all of different things: So far, we’ve seen the scrambled letters of the album title, a grid of faces and a picture of what looks like monster-on-monster sex. But though they all depict different things, the pictures were all painted using the same emotional pallete — childish, profoundly weird and full of color.

The art pieces parallel the songs on Friend Opportunity and, to a degree, all Deerhoof songs. Vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki’s chirpy pipes and broken engrish have always given the band an infantile vibe. The rest of the group’s insistence on noisily exploring heavy metal, blues, punk and pop in the space of a song have gotten Deerhoof labeled “art rock” over and over. But Friend Opportunity is a little different from past Deerhoof outings. Its colors are sharper, its pictures are more distinct, and the twisted-child muse behind the music seems a little more self-aware. It’s the kind of album that sounds stunning on first listen and stays pretty good each time after that.

Friend Opportunity is a compact album. Its 10 terse, fully-formed tracks (well, the 11-minute closer isn’t quite terse) stand in easy contrast to 2005’s overlong and undercooked (but worthwhile) The Runners Four. And from the first seconds, Deerhoof makes clear they’re no longer dabbling in the manically infectious pop fragments of 2002’s excellent Reveille nor are they going for the stunted emotional beauty of 2003’s Apple O’ and 2004’s Milkman. Friend Opportunity is a rock n’ roll record, and not in the harsh, cerebral sense that rock n’ roll has sometimes meant with the band. It’s a rock record for dancing, for driving, for chilling — in short, it’s a classic.

That doesn’t mean they’ve ditched innovation. Opener “The Perfect Me” smacks you in the face with exclamatory synth bursts and gallopping woodblock percussion. Then it falls into verses and choruses that alternately thump with a heartbeat bass drum, sway with jazz guitars and explode in shimmering crecendos. Single “+81″ attacks the rigidity of modern life with sound: Trumpets announce a cavalry charge of drum rolls that careen straight into a blues guitar riff. The chorus — “Choo choo choo choo beep beep” — sounds like typical Satomi baby-talk, but it’s more likely simulating the sound of car horns, sirens, cell phone ringers and over-stimulated “shopping shoppers.”

Each song manages to stand out by mining some niche of the pop-rock-indie-electronica universe. “Matchbook Seeks Maniac” could have been an ’80s prom ballad if listeners, still high off of the anti-asian racism of The Breakfast Club, wouldn’t have started giggling at Satomi’s distinctly Japanese cooing. “Kidz Are So Small” harkens back to the weirdo animal-mantra songs of past Deerhoof records (”Come See The Duck,” “Panda,” “Gore In Rut,” etc.), but instead of cloaking Satomi’s canine musings with vicious guitar noise, the band uses string samples and an old-school hip hop beat to make something that’s fun and easy to listen to.

The only song on the album that’s not immediately gratifying is closer “Look Away,” whose runtime is nearly a third of the album’s. Brooding guitars swell and recede, interlock and clash, with Satomi only occasionally entering to throw in some eerie vocals. At first it sounds impenetrable. But turn off the lights, put on the headphones, and the song becomes a proggy, beautiful and cathartic journey.

We’ll get to see the real album art, not just online previews, Tuesday when Friend Opportunity is officially released. While the 12 separate album covers might boost the record’s concept and provide a perfect metaphor for its music, they’re really not needed to appreciate what Deerhoof has done on Friend Opportunity. For the first time on a Deerhoof album, anyone can sit down and enjoy the band’s sense of melody, entropy and technical skill since all those elements are packaged in well-drawn songs. In that way, Deerhoof has ditched “being artsy” for “making art” — and that’s the sign of an artist who matters.