Six albums into an extraordinary tenure, most listeners will know where they stand on the Hold Steady – a Brooklyn rock band gestated in Minneapolis, who recently celebrated 10 years amplified. These five men, fond of a beer or 12, embody a great and rare contradiction: they come with equal amounts of brains and brawn. Theirs is a muscular, air-punching sound that resuscitates the melodic churn of American hardcore, but cleaves close to an older tradition, where ringing guitar solos, feet on monitors and storytelling are sacrosanct. Teeth Dreams is, in many ways, the big record they have long been threatening to make.  Where the Hold Steady used to sound like the E Street Band playing Hüsker Dü, Teeth Dreams actually plays up guitarist Tad Kubler's longstanding Thin Lizzy fixation. This time around, the band are also packing more firepower in the strings, in the form of third guitarist Steve Selvidge, who fills the gap left by the 2010 departure of keyboard player Franz Nicolay; producer Nick Raskulinecz, meanwhile, a veteran of Foo Fighters jobs, is tasked with reclassifying the Hold Steady from indie rock to something more ear-pinning. As well as all the customary riffing and chiming, there's now ample opportunity for Kubler and Selvidge to duel. On With the Business is a standout track for multiple reasons, not least the bit where one guitar plays a Doppler effect arpeggio while the other underlines the gravity of the situation in which the song's narrator finds himself. "Conventional wisdom says we should probably cruise," exhales singer Craig Finn. "I said a couple of things that probably weren't technically true."  Finn is the kind of lyricist who gets compared to the best short-story writers, and justly so. The glittering run of mid-00s Steady albums – Almost Killed Me, Separation Sunday, Boys and Girls in America – hinged around a recurring cast: kids on drugs, getting into all sorts of trouble that end in the hospital or the confessional. Since then, two perfectly good albums, Stay Positive and Heaven Is Whenever, struggled to maintain the heroic momentum created by 2006's Boys and Girls. Kubler's recurrent pancreatitis marked a turning point; during his rehabilitation, Finn put out a thoughtful solo album. More recently, Finn's mother passed away, giving rise to the anxieties that give the album its title (dreams about teeth are thought to indicate fear of loss or change). There is, accordingly, less youthful, devil-may-care glee in the disportment of Finn's creations now. There may be "blood on the bed" in The Ambassador, but – with the exception of Runner's High – the medics have retreated. "The kid that went down isn't dead," Finn notes on Almost Everything, "he just can't find his phone." Some may miss the high casualty count in Hold Steady songs; the dramas by the quarries. But Finn remains consistently compassionate towards his misguided and misdirected cast, the party girls, the spurned exes and the passive aggressives: you just have to listen harder for the denouements in amid all the guitar heroics.  This album takes anxiety as a theme, but it sounds materiallyless neurotic than their previous records, for good and ill. Oaks, the sprawling nine-minute closer, finds the Hold Steady trying to seed a future as a classic rock band. There's nothing but boldness in the guitars throughout, and ambition in Finn's upscaling from hedonist morality plays towards what On With the Business calls "that American sadness", a preoccupation apparently crystallised when Finn read David Foster Wallace. Happily, American sadness is a theme the Steady know well, along with desperation, and reckless joy.
The Hold Steady's sixth album sees their sound get bigger and singer Craig Finn's songwriting subtly evolve, writes Kitty Empire