Fifteen years and eight albums in, it seemed safe to know what to expect from Sloan. The Haligonians-turned-Torontonians would release another record with a great guitar-rock anthem courtesy of Patrick Pentland, a couple of decent Chris Murphy pop ballads and a whole lot of filler. It would move a few copies, be an excuse to tour and then all but a single or two would never be heard again.

That was the way it had been since the late '90s, following the commercial apex of One Chord to Another and Navy Blues. And Sloan's last album, 2003's Action Pact - as unimaginative a disc as the foursome ever put out - hardly suggested we were in for a change.

So chalk up Never Hear the End of It, released yesterday, as one of the year's most pleasant surprises.

Even if the music was awful, the mere fact that Sloan has released an album with 30 (yes, 30) tracks is to be celebrated. If nothing else, it's a break from routine - something Sloan desperately needed if it was to avoid becoming a nostalgia act. But the really good news is that it's the best thing they've done in ages.

While the double-album (this one is actually crammed onto one disc, but the vinyl version is double) traditionally finds a band losing its focus, Never Hear the End of It is the soundtrack to Sloan rediscovering theirs. A return to the more eclectic retro-pop of their early days, it's got all four members - Murphy, Pentland, guitarist Jay Ferguson and drummer Andrew Scott - back to sharing songwriting duties. And with tracks ranging from 50 seconds to five minutes, most of them rolling into each other without gaps in between, it achieves a cohesion that their previous releases have lacked.

"We don't actually communicate enough to ever have a mission statement," Murphy says over the phone, denying the band was aiming for something this ambitious when it started. "It just was taking a long time, and over the past couple of years some of the guys had kids. I didn't have anything to do - I didn't have kids - so I wrote a whole bunch of songs. All four of us write, so we only ever have to come up with, like, three songs each every year-and-a-half.

"We started demoing last October and we were supposed to be done by, like, April. It just kept getting pushed back, so we just kept recording more and more songs."

The sharp contrast to their previous release, though, seems to be more than a coincidence. In fact, Never Hear the End of It appears to be at least partly a reaction to the recording of Action Pact, which saw Sloan taking the uncharacteristic step of bringing in an outside producer, Tom Rothrock, in hope of a more straight-ahead rock album.

"The last record we did was pretty straight-ahead," Murphy says. "I feel like I'm apologizing for being straight-ahead, but I guess we had a plan and some kind of commercial aspirations which ... you could say it all f---ing went in the garbage. ... Working with a producer, we sort of allowed someone else to be involved in the song selection. So a lot of the songs that got picked for that one were of a certain type. We're sort of back to anything goes.

"Our last record was weird, in that Andrew's not on it [as a singer-songwriter] and it's just sorta straight-ahead. That's been our last record for three or four years, and that's kinda driven me crazy. It's been an excruciatingly long time for me to have that be what we're about."

The fortunate part, given the disappointment of Action Pact - not to mention the longstanding rumours that the foursome aren't exactly as tight as they once were - is that they've rebounded rather than packed it in. And for that, Sloan credits the egalitarian arrangement that they seem to define themselves by.

"We split the money four ways, so it's none of this 'I hope I get the single, 'cause I'll get a new swimming pool,' " Murphy says. "We all make the same amount of money, no matter what."

"In the day of the collective, we're a collective too, in that we actually split the money," he says. "Actually, I challenge that any of these real collectives is really splitting the money equally with everyone."

By this point, Murphy and his bandmates have recognized that they'll never make their fortune putting out music. But to their credit, they've sent a clear message that they're anything but complacent.

"I think it would be good for us to make a record that's somewhat polarizing," Murphy says. "I think we have goodwill in the media and with people in general - like 'Sloan, those guys are good guys.' Or 'Hey, Sloan have a new record.' 'How many songs on it?' '12.' 'Oh, that's good. Good for them.' At some point, we have to make a record that people either love or hate. I want people to get in fist fights about our band, whether they like us or hate us. I don't want people to just go 'Oh yeah, good for them. Anyway, what's the Arcade Fire doing?'"

Chances are, fans will be too busy digesting Never Hear the End of It to wonder what anyone else is doing for the next while. Having set the bar higher than it's been in many years, Sloan just has to figure out what to do for an encore.