Kool & The Gang, “People Just Wanna Have Fun.”

The last album by Kool & the Gang, 2021’s Perfect Union, was a more mature, more sophisticated album of chill-out music that showed the band’s range and evolution. This made sense; it’d just lost founding members Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas and Ronald Bell, brother of frontman and bass player Robert “Kool” Bell. It was a somber album for a somber time.

People Just Wanna Have Fun is not that. And it’s great.

It may seem paradoxical to praise Perfect Union for not being party music and also praising People Just Wanna Have Fun for being party music, but I don’t see it that way. If anything, it to reinforces the band’s growth in its nearly 60 years of existence. Kool & the Gang developed new skills and refined and updated its original sound for changing times and tastes.

If someone put this album on at a barbecue, you’d never suspect it was from a couple septuagenarians in Bell and drummer George “Funky” Brown. It’s not EDM or trap or whatever kids these days are into, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also absolutely not the sort of ’70s throwback you might expect. It’s an evolution with the same roots but steeped in the changes in music since.

Single “Let’s Party” is a perfect example. When it opens you can hear funk. The bass and guitar lines, pacing and structure come from funk. But around that core is dance music. There’s loops and modulated vocals and synths. It’s a modern song, built on the foundation that Kool & the Gang pioneered.

“Moviestar” could be a deep cut from an album from the band’s heyday if not for the hip-hop verse in the middle, which somehow doesn’t feel out of place. A lot of artists try to update their sound by shoehorning a rapper onto the bridge but, here it’s an organic part of the song. It’s clear Bell and Brown like it themselves; it’s not there to appeal to someone else.

The album follows that pattern. Each song is some combination of funk and dance music, sometimes more a funk song with dance elements, sometimes a dance song with a funk rhythm. There are still saxophone on songs but it’s not as central as it was 50 years ago.

Even the slower entries like “VIP” are club-style R&B. I have no money, charisma, wardrobe, youth or desire to be around people to have any experience with an actual club’s actual VIP area, but if I did happen to find myself there against my will and “VIP” was playing, it wouldn’t feel out of place. Though that’s coming from someone who would be out of place, so take it with a grain of salt.

Outliers include “Give Love,” which has a bit of a reggae flair; “Heavens Gift,” with a bit of a Latin influence; and “That’s What I Love About You,” the longest song at about five minutes and a classic R&B ballad. The genre-jumping doesn’t make the album feel disjointed, though, since these are garnishes.

People Just Wanna Have Fun is is an album by a band that’s comfortable with what it is and what it does but hasn’t insulated itself so totally that new ideas and sounds can’t get in. Kool & the Gang clearly don’t just know but enjoy new music and are open to letting it influence their own well-practiced sound. The result is an album that sounds more modern than the band’s pedigree would suggest.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.