But like the flower the insect is perched upon, there’s a sense of vulnerability and fragility – evident in the cover art’s notable absence of former bandmate Nathan Maddox, who was fatally struck by a lightening bolt in 2002, and whose image adorned 2005’s Gods Money and 2009’s Saint Dymphna. While visually, the band have started to move on from the tragedy, there is still plenty of turbulence accompanying this album.

After playing just one night of their 2009 European tour, an electrical fire destroyed all of their equipment, including memory sticks and samples for this album. What wasn’t destroyed by the fire itself, was doused with water hoses. Writing on their blog, the scene sounded almost post-apocalyptic, “we arrived on the scene to find every piece of equipment we own scattered out in the parking lot…melted, charred, and still smouldering.”

Picking up the shards of what was the beginnings of this album, and piecing them back into a complete whole took over a year. But this gathering of fragmented scraps is more symbolic of the process at the very heart of Gang Gang Dance – taking in random pieces of electronica, avant garde, noise, worldbeat and trance. When they started playing together in New York in 1999, in a pre-internet, pre-ADD-shuffle generation, this piecemeal improvisation would have sounded space-age. But now in a globalised world of post-everything, their structureless mentality is enhanced by technology that can disseminate their work in a matter of seconds, and has bred disciples from These New Puritans to Yea Sayer – further generations of geographically unhindered and indefinable artists.

Where’s God’s Money was abrasive, at times invoking early British industrial experiments, Saint Dymphna was euphoric (it’s hard to imagine any of Gang Gang’s earlier work being ripped off by Florence Welch in the same way as ‘House Jam’). Eye Contact falls somewhere in between the two; somehow mixing the grit of the former and the gloss of latter.

Opener ‘Glass Jar’ is 11 minutes of electronic bliss – transcendental synths with pin prick pulses and highways of Lizzie Bougatsos’s ethereal vocals. ‘Mankilla’ encapsulates all the raw energy of 2009’s ‘Princes’, the collaboration with then rising grime star Tinchy Stryder. Taking elements of grime, 90s trance keyboards, and a vocoded rendition of nursery rhyme “hush little baby”, it invokes for a brief moment the twisted vocals of the Knife’s Karin Andersson. But even in those flitting moments of derivation, such as the bouncing 70s soul groove ‘Romance Layers’ there is always an element out of place – a distorted vocal, or an over-aggressive keyboard. Even Gang Gang Dance’s attempts at derivation are somehow transgressive.

Almost like a prologue to Eye Contact are the spoken words “I can hear everything. It’s everything time”. It’s a direct acknowledgement of their own disregard for borders and categories, both audibly and visually, from a band who have set themselves firmly and knowingly in the ether. It’s also a multi-sensory experience – Gang Gang Dance don’t just hear everything, they see it. True to spirit, Eye Contact is a is a cosmic tunnel through space and time, needing no further postscript than that initial utterance in past tense: Eye Contact will leave you reeling that you have heard everything and in everything time.