“I’m coming to the brink of a great disaster,” sings Andrew Bird on his new album, persuasively titled My Finest Work Yet. “The end just has to be near.” It’s not the first time he’s portended the apocalypse. More than a decade ago, on an album called The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Bird painted a strangely reassuring picture of societal collapse, even promising there’d be snacks. These days, his outlook is less rosy. “The Earth spins faster, whistles right past you/ whispers death in your ear,” Bird laments. Those whispers come in different keys— gun violence, rising tides, the dead ends of nationalism— but while these 10 new songs are littered with the ruins of empire (“they say Rome wasn’t built in a day/ but it all came down in the month of May”), the larger issue is how the hard work of neighborly love and participative democracy has been replaced by the comfort and convenience of disembodied online rancor. Bird’s distressed but never despairing record is a challenge to log off of Twitter and get back to the grind; it’s both a call to activism and a clarification of what meaningful activism actually entails. “No more excuses, no more apathy,” one song says; the world groans under the weight of indifference, but My Finest Work Yet lights a fire. “We’re gonna turn it around,” Bird pledges, because what other choice do we have? As Flannery O’Connor would say, the life you save may be your own.

Bird underscores the high stakes with some of his most direct writing to date—though such things are always relative. He still rattles off wry tongue-twisters (“for those who sit recalcitrant and taciturn/ you know I’d rather turn and burn than scale this edifice”), and pivots easily to historic allusion (“it feels like 1936/ in Catalonia”). Jokes about J. Edgar Hoover bump up against references to King Ghidora, and just leave it to Andrew Bird to contextualize some of his most straight-ahead topical truisms (“history forgets the moderates”) within a retelling of Greek myth. Sisyphus, legendarily forced to spend eternity rolling a heavy stone up a mountain, has long been an emblem of complacency or addiction, and Bird’s iteration makes sure to acknowledge the collateral damage left in his wake (“had a house down there but I lost it long ago”). But where the Sisyphus of lore remains eternally stuck in his rut, Bird’s character has enough, and becomes a hero just for refusing to push his burden any further. “Did he raise both fists and say, ‘to hell with this’/ And just let the rock roll?” Bird asks, finding holy purpose in noncompliance. The song becomes a wondrous meditation on the blessedness of whole-assing when half measures offer greater comfort: “I’d rather fail like a mortal than flail like a god,” Bird’s Sisyphus thunders, preferring a leap of faith into the abyss over remaining in stasis any longer.

But Bird neither fails nor flails here. My Finest Work Yet does indeed feel like a consolidation of strengths—plucky, funny, sophisticated, tuneful. You’ll only need to listen to these songs a time or two before you’re able to whistle along, something Bird does often, imbuing his songs with just the twist of whimsy or shadow of menace they require. The whimsy is balanced by a jostling physicality; Bird produced the album with Paul Butler, favoring live vocal takes and the crackling energy of a small band—splashes of piano, upright bass, guitar, crisp snare pops and cavernous rim shots from boon drummer Abraham Rounds. Bird’s violin is the anchor, gently plinking out tunes and then cresting into ravishing melody. His music can conjure a full range of motion, and several songs sound like they were made to move bodies: “Proxy War” rises and falls with the buoyant bounce of Motown, while “Don the Struggle” works like a wind-up toy, a stately march suddenly exploding into frenzied dance. Even working in an intimate framework, Bird shows an easy way with dramatic build-up: “Archipelago” has enough whoah-ohs to fuel an Arcade Fire song, while “Olympians” gallops and then sprints on its way to a fist-pumping chorus.

In every way, these are songs of action and idealism, even as they acknowledge inertia’s sweet seductions. “Bloodless,” a slinky cabaret, imagines a moral landscape where the good guys equivocate, the evil are truly evil, and most of us stagnate in the murky middle; we just “hem and we haw,” Bird opines, and you sense that he’d almost rather you goose-step with the fascists than sit on the bench. (“Because you are lukewarm,” a relevant Bible verse says, “I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”) Bird posits that the powerful have a vested interest in sowing division, just so long as it doesn’t bubble over into actual revolt: “They’re banking on the sound and fury,” he observes. “Makes you wonder what it’s all got to do with me.” He answers his own question on “Fallorun,” where gossamer violin notes build into U2-worthy euphoria, and where the state of our union has plenty to do with all of us. “We could have been together/ But you couldn’t stand the weather here,” he mourns, and he could be talking either to a faithless lover, a wayward neighbor, or anyone who’s ever talked a big game but then buckled when the shit hit the fan. The song appeals to those who take a stand without making a sacrifice, channeling all their moral fervor into empty and ego-stoking gestures. “You think you’re making choices,” Bird sings, “But there’s no one really here/ Just tone-deaf angry voices/ That are breathing in your ear.”

Bird’s idealism may initially scan as overly earnest, but what he’s offering here is counterprogramming for a kind of false idealism, the one that says the people who talk the loudest are making the biggest difference. Crucially, for all the album’s concern with bridge-building, My Finest Work Yet doesn’t dispute the existence of injustice, nor does it suggest we acquiesce to it. Enemies are invoked a few times; an oblique reference to an abominable “Man of the Year” entry is the closest Bird gets to naming a particular boogeyman, while on the winding “Archipelago” he suggests that we define ourselves largely by the people we choose to hate. But while Bird spurns fearmongers, he stops short of disdaining them, understanding it to be short-sided and self-destructive to do so: “Now there are no sides,” he moans, democracy’s wreckage strewn at his feet. “Try selling that one to an angry mob.” He understands what James Baldwin was talking about when he said, “what you do to me, you do to you”—that ultimately, we sink or swim together, that violence to the Other is violence to our whole body. That’s why My Finest Work Yet bets everything on the painful and necessary work of incarnation and intimacy; in “Proxy War,” online discourse is contrasted with “real life,” where words have the power to draw blood and stop time. In “Sisyphus,” love is the precipitating force in our hero’s unburdening; “it’s got nothing to do with fate and everything to do with you,” he confesses to an unnamed beloved. And in the closing “Bellevue Bridge Club,” Bird threatens to pull his slumbering partner out of bed and onto the floor, promising paradigm-altering, empathy raising scenes “of life beyond your front door.” There, just across the threshold, opportunity abounds for connection, for justice, for truth and reconciliation—but unless we’re vigilant, it’ll all whistle right past us.