Don't bother checking the calendar. You haven't been sucked into a time- shifting wormhole or lurched up from a lengthy coma. It's 2008, and the B-52s really do have a new album, Funplex, their first in 16 years.

But Funplex is no comeback. The B-52s have toured steadily since the late '90s, and have never actually gone away. Still, the gap between 1992's Good Stuff and Funplex - punctuated by two new tracks for 1998's Time Capsule retrospective - certainly represents a long studio drought.

"I'm not sure why now is the right time, other than we've been performing for the last 10 years so we did feel the need for new material to perform live," says guitarist Keith Strickland via phone. "We had tried writing seven years ago, but the energy wasn't there and we weren't on the same page creatively, so we abandoned that idea but continued to perform. The idea of a new album evolved out of our performance."

Funplex is a mash-up of the B-52s' early immediacy and their later, more polished approach with the emphasis, as always, on partying out of bounds, from the frenetic pulse of "Pump" to the guitar churn of "Hot Corner" and the expansive dance mood of "Juliet of the Spirits."

"It's sort of a combination of everything we've done," says Strickland. "I did think in terms of certain iconic sounds, like the guitar in 'Pump,' but to me, it was something to play with and not so much trying to recapture anything or being nostalgic in any way. I feel like we have our language and our own universe, so it was fun to use the cheesy keyboards and twangy guitars as almost iconic samples. It was like a little art piece for me, in a way. It was taking things out of context and putting them in a new environment."

Like most of the band's albums, Funplex began with Strickland composing the foundational music at home before subjecting it to the full band process.

"I was listening to a lot of electronic dance music and a lot of rock 'n' roll," he recalls. "When I was thinking what I'd do for this album, I had to think, 'What would interest me?' And that interested me - putting electronic music together with rock, together with our sound. That was a pivotal moment for me in terms of inspiration. It was a good jumping-off point."

Funplex's dance/rock hybridization continued once Strickland met with vocalists Fred Schneider, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson, whose distinctive yelps, warbles and manic energy have shaped the B-52s' identity from their 1976 start.

"It's chaos at the beginning," says Strickland, laughing as he describes the band's writing sessions. "We all arrange the final structure of the songs together. I've often said it's like trying to turn jazz into rock 'n' roll. It's backward from the way most people do it."

For Funplex, Strickland created the basic tracks at his home in Key West, Florida, then flew up to Atlanta to meet with Schneider, Pierson and Wilson to get their lyrical and vocal input.

"I come in with chord changes, bass lines, keyboards, fully orchestrated pieces of music," says Strickland. "Fred, Kate and Cindy come up with lyrics and melodies based on the chord changes, however that inspires them, and they do that through a jamming process and improvisation. They will listen to the music and find the parts that they like and begin to form a storyline or a subject or a focus to the song and pick out melodies."

Although Strickland tends to write the initial music for the group with his vocalists' unique approach in mind, he says the result of his bandmates' input on the music he brings to their collaboration is always a surprise to some extent. With a 16-year gap between full albums, Funplex was ripe for such moments.

"They always do something completely different from what I would have done," says Strickland with a laugh. "When I'm writing the music, I hear the melodies or the phrasing for the vocals, but I leave that open and I don't fill it in and I don't really say anything. That's their terrain, and they have all the room in the world to do what they do. For 'Juliet of the Spirits,' I had imagined in my mind something totally different, and then Kate and Cindy did this thing that was quite beautiful but I didn't hear it going in that direction. Fred wrote lyrics for that as well; he doesn't sing on the track but he wrote lyrics."

And while Strickland's music is fully formed when Schneider, Pierson and Wilson first hear it, there's always room for accommodation when the trio begins to apply their unique spin to the material.

"And in that process, I sit there and if I hear their melodies or vocals going in a particular way, I'll rearrange the music to better fit the direction they're going in. Even though I come in with a completely arranged piece of music, once they start, I go back and adapt it to what they're doing. It's still very collaborative. There are a lot of ideas in that room when we get together. There's the singer-songwriter type of songwriting, and ours is the village. The whole village is writing the song."

Although Funplex isn't literally a comeback, in many ways it does represent a return to the captivating visceral rawness of the first two B-52s albums. At least partially recorded in the band's native Athens, Georgia (where they had never actually recorded), mere blocks from the site of their first live performance, that feeling was tangible in the sessions.

"We felt it right from the get-go, when we started writing this time," says Strickland. "I felt more focused on the music and its direction, and since Fred, Kate and Cindy got to work with that, it gave them more focus as well. But the desire was there, too. We really wanted to do this."

The process of making Funplex has energized the quartet, and their excitement over the new material is clearly spilling over into their live performance. Not surprisingly, there is a great deal of anticipation among the group to return to the studio before another decade and a half peels off the calendar.

"I would really like to do something fairly quickly on the heels of this and I'm trying to think of ways to do it and tour at the same time," says Strickland. "Certainly, the technology that's available to us now offers that possibility. I could have stuff on my laptop and when I'm on the tour bus, I could start programming beats and getting ideas down. There's a lot of down time, a lot of waiting around when you're on tour. I'm hoping to get some tracks forming and then perhaps working with the band at soundchecks and maybe even record some stuff. There are so many opportunities if you want to use them, and I'm thinking we should do it."

The B-52s, Eagle Seagull: 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 29 at House of Blues, 308 Euclid Ave., 216.241.5555. Tickets: $36 adv, $38 dos.