The Bad Plus isn’t just a band; it’s a commentary on notions of jazz, of pop, on the intersection of the two. Their albums are all about the subtle subversion of what these easy genre signifiers have come to mean, and, as such, every new Bad Plus album feels like a critique of the one that came before it. the group isn’t interested in pushing any particular definition of jazz music so much as they are proving that, when a medium offers such endless possibilities, an easy definition simply isn’t in the cards.

Never Stop is a subtle subversion of another sort; it tweaks not just ideas of genre, but of The Bad Plus itself. Once again, it’s a markedly different recording than the one that came before it. For All I Care was an album heavy on interpretations of pop songs and modern classical music, and it featured a vocalist — Wendy Lewis — on most of its tracks. Never Stop is vocal-free, but, shockingly, it’s also cover-free. It’s the first time in Bad Plus history that they’ve confined themselves to originals. And that’s something of a bold move: this is a band whose fame rests to a large degree on their combination of high-brow jazz idioms with songs by David Bowie, Nirvana, and Rush.

The immediate concern is that The Bad Plus is making a bid to be taken seriously — moreso than they already are — as musicians and composers. But seriousness, in the end, is a bit overrated, and this is a band smart enough to invest the focus in the music, not themselves. A career built on combining originals with classical pieces, jazz abstractions, and visions of pop and rock songs as a new jazz songbook has long afforded them the opportunity to invest their albums with elastic energy, humor, eclecticism, and a sense of play — qualities that remain undiminished on their latest LP. They’ve removed what once seemed like a crucial piece of their puzzle — cover songs — and kept the big picture completely in tact.

Actually, the stylistic and tonal similarities between this and previous Bad Plus albums are striking — not because they’re repeating themselves, but because they’ve absorbed so much from the different musical idioms they’ve been playing with. Never Stop is, in some sense, the most purely “jazz” album they’ve released in a long time, but it doesn’t move so far in that direction to actually try to pin down exactly what “jazz” is. The key difference here is simply in the recording process, where all three band members set up in the same room together and recorded live from the floor, attempting (successfully) to capture the sort of loose energy and improvisational flow of classic jazz labels from the ’50s and ’60s.

So their music remains brainy, knotty at times, but Never Stop might be, by some slight measure, the most visceral and physical album they’ve recorded. It begins with a kind of a tease — or perhaps a challenge—in the gathering — storm abstraction of “The Radio Tower Has a Beating Heart,” a rush of sound and rhythm that builds its way toward melody in small, incremental fragments. But once it settles into a groove, it’s a memorable one. “My Friend Metatron” is another slightly out-there number that seems rooted somewhat in free jazz, but the poetic license it takes with melody and rhythm never lose hold of the center. It’s a showcase for the trio’s sharp improvisational skills, yet it hangs together as well as any shape-shifting pop song.

But then, there’s a song like the title cut, which basically is a pop song. And “You Are,” seven minutes of crunching rock dressed up in the hand-me-downs of off-kilter jazz. (So much in modern jazz gets hung up on being the “thinking man’s music” that it forgets to swing; here’s a band that doesn’t just swing, but flat-out rocks.) “People Like You” is a shuffling ballad that’s totally bare bones, with a melodic sweetness and undercurrents of melancholy that remind one of Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts music. This is cerebral and primal, eclectic and very focused stuff. On this one The Bad Plus has flipped the script and — glory hallelujah — come up with what sounds like nothing short of another killer Bad Plus album.