Beyond the Valley of the Ugly Boys is the second studio album from the Dunedin electropop nutters Manthyng. With it, Manthyng grant re-entry to their world of thudding dance parties, eccentric characters, and their peculiar, hedonists’ brand of nostalgia.

This album is packaged up in full-bodied beats and often surprising samples and effects that the producer, DJ Stevolicious, has masterfully designed to trigger a dance response. Its launch track, Nighttime, may contain his heaviest bassline yet, overlaid with a synth-horn hook that sweetly courts the listener, while singles such as Repeat and Solomon Says are rhythmically insistent injunctions to shake your ass, shake it now.

Stevolicious has a working grammar of sound that ensures the listener never has to endure monotony on the dancefloor – a failing of lesser electropop. Licks from the keyboard sweep in at just the right time, and the sonic punctuation takes a range of forms, from simple claps through to a lion’s roar and an elephant’s parp, just to keep things interesting. Meanwhile the vocals of Stanley Manthyng and the band’s hot new texture, Lady Manthyng (Tahu Mackenzie) are filtered in beguiling ways that evoke everything from 1980s automated messages to a sonorous priest of ancient times.

Causing people to dance is always the objective of Manthyng’s work, and yet the songs are not electropop “lite”. In fact, they are often character-driven. Those familiar with the band’s 2011 Album Love Child will recall its fragmentary tales from the lives of the defective and the destitute, the proletariat and the prostitute. “A friend of mine had a crazy husband . . .” Here, with Beyond the Valley of the Ugly Boys, the lyricist Stanley Manthyng presents a new mardi gras of misfits.

“This is not a love song, it’s about a kinky man,” goes the start of Sharon O’Neill. The single Dirty Old Tongue tells of a woman who is “so dire, a total creep”, while You’ll Feel It Too is a lament for a roguish lover. “There was a time, that you believed him / Just raise your arms, you’ll feel it too.” The album’s very title imagines a valley full of infamy, and whatever lies beyond it.

On the dimly lit dancefloor we sometimes find ourselves surrounded by dry ice. Manthyng’s sound often has a quality to it that is like looking through that fog to hedonistic days past. What do we remember? What do we want to forget? This is dance music that hints at some historical danger — “bomb goes off, leave your friends behind” — or recalls that lover who thrilled you but always left: “your karma comes as his love’s leaving”. Such lyrics are met with bittersweet sensation in the melodic and harmonic choices.

When it is not feeling nostalgic, this suite of songs takes an intensely irreverent approach to the partyer’s pain, dispelling it with the imperious and loud command: Dance.