David Gilmour, “Luck and Strange.”

It’s been a decade since the final Pink Floyd album, the largely instrumental The Endless River, and almost that long since the last solo studio album by David Gilmour, Rattle That Lock. Much like Randy Newman, to whom he bears little artistic resemblance, Gilmour may only surface every other leap year or so, but his solo career provides his fans – and by extension, Floyd fans – quality new work.

So it is with Luck and Strange, only Gilmour’s fifth solo studio album after his 1978 eponymous debut. It has all the Gilmour-ish signatures: mostly deliberate tempos, atmospheric keyboard washes, jazzy electric piano and long, moody guitar solos in the artist’s famous bluesy fluid prog style.

Gilmour covers his usual territory – clear-headed, if sometimes downcast, observations on everyday life – with help from several family members here, most notably youngest daughter Romany Gilmour, who takes lead vocals on the stark “Between Two Points,” and duets with her father on the lovely “Yes, I Have Ghosts,” on which she also plays the harp.

In fact, most of these songs – including a reworking of the British pop duo Montgolfier Brothers’ 1999 song “Between Two Points” – share a basic formula, generally ending with an extravagant David Gilmour solo. His playing on Luck and Strange is strong and familiar sounding.

Novelist Polly Samson, Gilmour’s wife, either wrote or co-wrote the lyrics to seven of the songs here (as she did with five songs on Rattle That Lock). Those lyrics continue in the style of the past few albums, as introspective as the best Pink Floyd but less confrontational and more personal.

Take, for example, “Scattered” and “Sings,” two songs near the end of the album that each address mortality and the way time passes more quickly the less of it we have left. “Scattered” comes at the subject from a fairly detached point of view: “Time is a tide that disobeys and it disobeys me,” Gilmour muses. “Sings” acknowledges age in a similarly melancholy way, but takes what pleasant solace it can: “Darling don’t make the tea, stay and snooze here with me … I’m not ready for news, or to leave this cocoon.”

After brief opening instrumental “Black Cat,” the album’s title song brings listeners to familiar territory. The controlled (perhaps deliberately) pace, the spacey synth fills, the guitar and electric piano lines that surface at the right times, bolstered by female background singers, sure sounds a lot like the work the world has come to expect from Gilmour over the past half century. Luck and Strange takes its place within that canon; if you like post-Roger-Water Pink Floyd, and Gilmour’s solo output, there’s much to like on the new album.

Single “The Piper’s Call” is a warning to those who seek either to be perfect, powerful or to find “a fixer who will numb your pain.” The message is clear enough, and so is the music. Building from a quiet acoustic strum into an electric fury, it offers a multifaceted musical view of Gilmour in a little over five minutes. And that this is billed as a single—in 2024, no less; that’s quite refreshing for this 60-something music listener.

Luck and Strange is no groundbreaker, but it doesn’t have to be. If all it had going for it had been Gilmour’s soloing atop his trademark atmospherics, that may have been enough for longtime fans. But the album is more than simply capturing the Pink Floyd sound in amber. To quote “A Single Spark,” “So pray to keep things rolling, I’ve only good intentions.“