On a recent Wednesday night, shortly before the release of its new album, “There’s a Riot Going On,” Yo La Tengo played a preview show at the new music venue National Sawdust, in Brooklyn. Critics, friends, and fans milled around in the intimate, otherworldly space—white-panelled walls with jaggedly geometric black laces, ceiling and floor repeating the pattern, the mood of a kind of avant-garde hive. The band—Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan, and James McNew—took the stage and began to play a mesmerizing hum: the beginning of the album’s first track, the instrumental “You Are Here.” Hearing it, a line of people waiting for Yo La Tengo-themed cocktails (the Mr. Tough, the Point and Shoot) quietly pivoted to face the stage. Hubley’s drums and Kaplan’s guitar, warm and engulfing, entered the fray. The band members looked industrious yet casual, eyes pointed downward. Kaplan, as ever, wore a striped shirt. They proceeded to a second new song, the dreamy “Forever,” without greetings or fanfare. Hubley and McNew sang, “Shoo-wop, shoo-wop,” delicately; Kaplan, just as delicately, sang, “Nights are getting slower / days are flying by. Hold me forever / hold on while we cry.”

“There’s a Riot Going On” shares a name, almost, with the Sly and the Family Stone album “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” from 1971, which was also released during a period of intense national angst. In the Yo La Tengo album’s liner notes, Luc Sante writes, “These are dark times, in our heads as much as in the streets.” There are times that call for anthems, he continues, and times that call for “a balm, a sound that will wrap around you.” “Riot,” the band’s fifteenth studio album, provides such a balm—on headphones, as at National Sawdust, it creates a special space to inhabit. In the dreamy “Polynesia #1,” as a guitar drifts in, Hubley sings, “I’m goin’ / to Polynesia / I’m goin’ / at my leisure.” Some songs are intimate and quiet—at the show, during “Forever,” you could hear a baby cooing in the crowd and ice rattling in a glass—others rocking, cacophonous. “Shortwave” feels oceanic, like the churning and roiling of water. During the bouncing “For You Too,” a veteran rock journalist near me smiled and tapped his foot in time. At different points, McNew played a double bass, Kaplan and Hubley switched to a guitar or a keyboard, Kaplan played maracas; the three musicians seemed to intuit one another’s actions, and the various layers, instruments, and moods all felt of a piece. The crowd was transfixed, considerate: at one point, a stranger in front of me turned, smiled, and whispered an apology for blocking my view, which he hadn’t even done. A joyous calm filled the air. It felt as if people who needed solace had found it and were glad to be enjoying it. A Tengo-ian phrase came to mind: “I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.”

Yo La Tengo’s music has provided a rock-and-roll kind of comfort for its fans for many years, in many ways. Hubley and Kaplan, a couple since the early eighties, started the band in 1984, and McNew joined it in 1992. The partnership of Hubley and Kaplan, and their partnership with McNew, feels harmonious for all the right reasons. All three are musically omnivorous; they’ve all internalized vast amounts of pop history, which they draw upon in their work. For fans who are New Yorkers, one of the pleasures of living here is the presence of Yo La Tengo in the city’s cultural life—in concerts, in their annual Hanukkah benefit shows, on the beloved New Jersey station WFMU, at countless fun special events—and also around town, where we regularly spot them enjoying shows and restaurants and riding bikes like the rest of us. The group’s enduring ability to make good music together, decade after decade, provides a model of stability and creative fulfilment that we don’t often see—it’s rare that you can love a band as a college student in the nineties and find their new music appealing and interesting into your forties.

I talked to McNew, Hubley, and Kaplan at Momofuku Ssäm, in the East Village. (They’re fans of David Chang, and he’s a fan of theirs.) Part of the process of recording the album involved getting comfortable with self-recording and self-producing. As a child, Hubley was encouraged to be comfortable being recorded; her parents, the Oscar-winning animators Faith and John Hubley (“Mr. Magoo”), who did animated segments for “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company,” also made short films that incorporated dialogues between their children, including Hubley and her sister. (Sometimes, Hubley and her siblings would be recruited to provide sounds like “kids yelling” for animated bits such as “The Adventures of Letterman” on “The Electric Company.”) McNew brought this up and asked her how it had felt, “knowing you could be incorporated into a project at any time.” Hubley didn’t say that she’d been at ease in her parents’ studio, or hearing its results. “I kind of enjoy it, but there’s some serious cringe action going on,” she said.

“Riot” was recorded in Hoboken, at the band’s longtime practice space. (Hubley and Kaplan lived in Hoboken for many years; in 1987, they had their wedding reception at the beloved, now-closed Hoboken venue Maxwell’s, where they met, in 1980, at a Feelies show. They now live in Manhattan. McNew lives in Brooklyn.) They’ve been recording themselves, with increasing degrees of sophistication, for about a decade. “Riot,” which they produced, came about through a different process than those they’ve used before, involving a combination of in-studio recording, editing, and musical improvisation. As Sante writes, “They did not rehearse or jam together beforehand; they turned on the recorder and let things coalesce. Songs came together over long stretches, sometimes as much as a year going by between parts.” Part of this process arose from their movie soundtrack work, which began with “Game 6” and “Junebug,” both from 2005, and which we will next hear in the forthcoming documentary based on Andrew Solomon’s book “Far from the Tree,” this summer.

In January of last year, around the time of the Presidential Inauguration and the Women’s Marches—Hubley attended the one in D.C.; Kaplan attended the one in New York; they met up that night in Philly, to play a benefit—they thought of the title “There’s a Riot Going On,” and it just felt right. Kaplan said that the band had covered a song from the Sly and the Family Stone album once.

“We did?” Hubley asked.

“We had done a college show—I’m thinking Vassar,” he said. “We were driving home late at night, with a show at the Knitting Factory the next day, and the Rodney King verdict had come in.”

“We heard about it on the radio,” McNew said.

“All hell was breaking loose,” Kaplan said. “The next day, we ended up throwing together some, I’m sure, sub-competent version of ‘(You Caught Me) Smilin’, ’ and did a whole sound-collage thing.”

The waiter brought a gift from the chef—“a little taste of all the hams we have in the house”—and waved his hand over the plate, describing their Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia origins. “Wow!” McNew said. Momofuku Ssäm seemed like home, too.

Kaplan said that the unusual process of creating “Riot” brings a spontaneity to the experience of playing the songs live. “We’ve never played them, so there was no chasing after something we had done before,” he said. “We were discovering it as we were doing it.”

McNew said, “It’s kind of like the dream where you discover there’s more rooms in your house—wow, we have fifteen new songs! I don’t recall writing fifteen new songs.”

“It feels like the record appeared in front of us without us even looking for it,” Kaplan said.