It may have been Johnny Rotten and Public Image who sneered that "anger is an energy" but it is Bobby Gillespie and Primal Scream who are fervently preaching it. You can feel this force on your first encounter with their latest album, Xtrmntr. Second time, you may be able to pick yourself off the ground. Third time, and you may even be able to get your breath back.

When it comes to making the right music for the right time, no-one can rival Primal Scream. The magnificent swell of their 1991 Screamadelica was perfectly pitched for the wide-eyed euphoria of a world that had discovered the joys of dancing all night. Their decision to become The Bootleg Stones for 1994's Give Out But Don't Give In may not have brought hordes of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger look-a-likes onto Main Street but 1997's Vanishing Point re-established the Scream as the band you wanted to be on the run with. Dark, deep and dubbed to perfection, it was the soundtrack for a road trip which could have taken either the high or the low road.

Xtrmntr is the nightmare after that trip comes to a messy halt. An album which is harder and tougher and weirder than anything any other modern band could produce, it cannot be classified. It certainly shows a heightened awareness of a wider world beyond the endless romp for pills and thrills, a world in which the Scream campaign for race attack victim Satpal Ram and rail against what Bobby Gillespie terms "multi-national corporate fascism". You could call it dance music because the Chemical Brothers and David Holmes are on hand but you may find it hard to dance to what they have re-arranged. The presence of My Bloody Valentine's wayward soul, Kevin Shields, hints at a rock edge but his take on If They Move, Kill 'Em is more a Sun Ra-styled jazz stride than a rock 'n' roll-sized strut.

It's the influence of Shields - as well as Holmes and the Chemical Brothers - which ensures that Xtrmntr maintains the elusive edge throughout. "We obviously know Kevin from his days on Creation," Gillespie explains. "When I first heard Loveless [My Bloody Valentine's 1991 album] I thought it sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. Totally new music. We got him to do a remix and he came up to the studio and started jamming. The sounds coming off his guitar were unbelievable."

It was the full-time arrival of former Stone Rose, Gary "Mani" Mounfield, to the ever-evolving cast which coincided with everything clicking into place. "Mani saved this band," Gillespie maintains. "It was a perfect twist of fate. He renewed all our energy because we needed something. We had no focus, we might not have gone on, and we certainly wouldn't have played live again."

Mani, for his part, is glad to have found a new gang to call his own. "What's great with the Scream is - and it might sound corny - but it's like being part of a family again," he says. "It always was with The Stone Roses; we were so tight. And it's the same in the Scream. I always knew it was gonna work. This album is staggering. It's punk, rock, dub, The Who, The Stooges on Raw Power, everything. It's just a step on from Vanishing Point again. It's a lot more experimental as well. That's what I like about it: it's dangerous."

Angular and angry, Xtrmntr is indeed a dangerous beast, snarling and sniping at your heels from beginning till end. Gillespie says it's an angry record because "we are angry at ourselves and angry at what we see. It's about what it's like to live in a modern city; it's a hard concrete sound. We're just trying to describe our surroundings so we made a record that sounds as hard and angry as the world around us. This is definitely music that was made in the city, not in some studio in the middle of the country."

Even those who make music in studios in the middle of the country know that they can't outpace the Scream. "They are a barometer for modern guitar music," Oasis's Noel Gallagher says. "The new record almost borders on jazz, and the stuff that Kevin Shields has done is by far the best thing they've ever done and probably will ever do."

This anger has little in common with the hedonism which Primal Scream once espoused on Screamadelica. That album was a soundtrack for "going out to clubs, staying out all night and then making it back into the studio", Gillespie recalls. "I still think it was something new and exciting. It's only recently that I have realised why people like it; it was made with a lot of love, and people respond to that."

On the other hand, Xtrmntr sounds like the nastiest comedown of all time with little or no connection to what has gone before (with the exception of the dark stretches alluded to on Vanishing Point). "But we never think about what we did last, and it would have been cowardly and pointless to keep making albums just like Screamadelica," Gillespie maintains. "You never know what is going to happen next, you just want to go forward and do new stuff and leave the past to the past. There are all these new people like Mani and Kevin Shields and they want to work with us and that's great for us. We have a huge pool of people we can call on who want to work with us. That's the way it's going to be for us from now on, I think."

With the band's long-time champion and friend, Alan McGee, fleeing his and their Creation Records nest for the wild wild west of the Internet, it will be fascinating to see where Primal Scream's nonconformist wiles now take them. Certainly a major label would find it very difficult to find any commercial corners to the house currently inhabited by Gillespie and his gang. Yet it's probably true to say that Primal Scream couldn't care less. Mavericks to the end, they will continue to make records as special as Screamadelica and as confrontational as Xtrmntr for an audience who believe in what they say and do. It's their definition of a punk rock style.

Gillespie certainly believes that his band and the modern music industry no longer share a dance card. "Every other band you could mention are just happy enough to be part of the music industry and the entertainment business, and they just get on with it and that's OK for them. But we're not like that; we've got an opinion and we've got a voice and that to us is more important than just fitting in. None of the big pop stars have anything to say or even want to say anything. It's just empty celebrity.

"There are no bands - rock or dance - making statements like Xtrmntr anymore. Nobody is doing it because nobody wants to."

Xtrmntr is out now on Creation Records. Primal Scream play Homelands, Mosney Holiday Centre, Co Meath on Saturday April 29th