If you imagine the latter‑day New York music scene as a kind of 4x400m relay run in very tight trousers, the Strokes handed the baton of visionary cool to DFA's James Murphy, who then passed it on to producer David Sitek, currently running under the name of Maximum Balloon.

Now recognised as a figure who can wrangle agreeable records out of celebs such as Scarlett Johansson, Sitek has spent the past decade or so developing in tandem with his early charges, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. He matured into auteurship with the anguished subterranean soul of his excellent main band, TV on the Radio.

With TVOTR on hiatus, Sitek has press-ganged family, new friends and special guests such as David Byrne on to a slightly different kind of record, one that formally marks your card and asks that you free your behind. "There's a dance I do when no one is looking," pouts Byrne like Talking Heads never ended, while Sitek throws some funky horns at him.

Sitek's old studio, Stay Gold, seemed to turn everything he touched to a lustrous murk. (Weed may or may not have been a factor.) In an effort to clear out his passages, he has since moved to California. Maximum Balloon suggests that light is penetrating Sitek's hypnotic fug, bringing clarity. "Communion" is almost a simple pop song, featuring a wistful performance from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' resident yelper Karen O. The pacey "Tiger" is as straightforward a booty-shaking track as Sitek has yet unleashed. There's a YouTube video of model Daisy Lowe dancing around to it in her pants.

But the notion of Sitek becoming a sonic ascetic doesn't hold water, and nor should it. He deals fundamentally in dazed grooves and jazz-derived wooze. The most revelatory tracks here –opener "Groove Me", sung by sometime rapper Theophilus London, and its follow-up, "Young Love" – remain rich in depth and detail as they motor along.

At times, though, you wonder if Sitek has clocked what fellow musical enabler Damon Albarn is doing with Gorillaz a little too closely. Gorillaz proteges Little Dragon appear here as well (surely, they must be the best-connected Swedish band that no one has ever heard of). Their song on Maximum Balloon, "If You Return", is typical of the album's failings. Karen O aside, Maximum Balloon tilts towards female vocalists (Holly Miranda; a woman called Ambrosia Parsley) with little to contribute but the gauziness of the just-roused.

The hits here are TV on the Radio tracks in all but name. "Absence of Light" is a grubby funk stomper starring TVOTR's Tunde Adebimpe, while Kyp Malone – whose own solo project, Rain Machine, was a wall-to-wall downer – promises a "Shakedown" that, typically, turns out to be the opposite of its title. While all around are dancing, Sitek wraps Malone's elegiac falsetto in synthetic funk that operates at the speed of honey; a sneak preview of the next TV On the Radio album, we hope.