Imagine going for a midnight stroll and daring to take a cautionary, sideway glance into your local graveyard. There, before a mass of stiff bodies in the moonlight, you spy Iggy Pop and Co. staging a lunar opera.

Post Pop Depression forms an apocalyptic ‘send-off’ (if we choose to credit Pop’s claims of finality) that oscillates between anxiety of artistic decline and a playful acquiescence to this decline; reveling in the ‘shit that turns to chocolate drops’ when one feels wholly down and out.

After conferring by prose poetry, as all artists should upon deciding to collaborate, Homme and Pop packed up and left for a three-week recording stint in Joshua Tree - Pop’s wife ensuring he was sufficiently clad, buying him a new pair of French long-johns for the experience. The pair returned with a haunting, Bowie-esque production of experimental melancholy: a dark insight into what feels like Iggy Pop’s prophetic finale as sole survivor of the sacred triangle, an isolation following Lou Reed’s death (2013) and David Bowie earlier this year. Josh Homme described Iggy, as "this beautiful grizzled piece of art… my job was to put it back in the right frame. Sometimes, to do that, you have to push."

Even with an extremely limited knowledge of the collaborative artists (Pop, QOTSA’s Homme, Arctic Monkeys’ Matt Helders and Dean Fertita), it’s not difficult to ascertain the source of the super group’s dynamic success. Homme tempers Pop, yoking his singing-come-yodeling-come-swaggering speech to the strength of his own guitar riffs. Particularly for the opening two tracks, he seems to be following a beat behind, cautiously spotting Pop as he roams with an infantile carelessness through his lyrics. In addition to Homme’s musical production, the pair’s recent live performances of the album display Iggy striding widely in his topless habitat, beating his fibrous chest, whilst Homme stands strong: a silent sentinel statuesque in the background, ensuring the singer’s exorbitant free-wheeling is channeled ‘in the right frame.’

Homme gifts the album with a similar quality to his production of the Arctic Monkey’s Humbug back in 2009; a sinister and psychedelic desert rock that colours so much of his own creations. The album’s opening: ‘Break Into Your Heart’ pays homage to a destructive and lustful criminality, Pop submits to his sallow state, a partly vacuous and tireless ‘lust for life’ is replaced with a need to dislocate the sexual act into a new, obscure and all-encompassing experience. He craves something like Henry Miller’s ‘burrow[ing] into life again, to put on flesh’. He is searching for his ‘Gardenia’: the paragon of wholesome and drowning sex with the ditch in her spine and a ‘deep, deep ass.’ The album explores a very pure fear of death and loneliness, but this fear falls perpetually back on sex as an inebriating saving grace.

Post Pop Depression elegiacally explores life post-punk, and bound up in this reality is the experience of departing from what it means to be Iggy Pop, saluting the heyday of his career in the 70s – Bowie and Berlin, The Stooges – as the somewhat fustian ‘greatest living poet.’ Pop is walking death row, admonishing: “I feel like I’m closing up after this.”  

However, despite pervading melancholic motifs, the album is injected with a carefree and sexed up funk. ‘Sunday’ and ‘German Days’ hit a far poppier note in direct contrast with track 6: ‘Vulture’, that croaks in a paroxysmal Tom Waits style through the verse and climaxes into a desert cry against the “toxic executive” who “wants your guts in his grip.” ‘American Valhalla’, the album’s third track opens with the pitter-patter of a clownish glockenspiel, layered in with a thick bassline, and the last track (and perhaps the best of the lot) ‘Paraguay’, chorally adulates the liberation of wild animals, roving a new plain. Though these moments of careless celebration tend to face up to their status as mere fantasy, they nevertheless warm up an otherwise bitter and troubling creation.

‘Paraguay’ is the perfect final act: with a punchy, strident and layered instrumental finale, a tremendous ‘too-de-loo motherfuckers’ farewell; Pop, in vitriolic defiance of the modern world, decides “Well, fuck it man/ I’m gonna pack my soul and scram."