New wave band Devo are still going strong with a national concert tour, the re-release of two of their most popular recordings and the promise of a new album in the spring. (Warner Music Canada)

Devo always stood out from the punk-new wave pack.

Partly, it was their humorous look: those red flowerpots (a.k.a. "energy-domes") they wore on their heads, and the industrial hazard suits that seemed to come from a 1950s sci-fi movie about a chemical spill. Technology running amok, toxic waste oozing into the atmosphere — it all served as creative inspiration for a band that grew up in the manufacturing heartland of Akron, Ohio. In concert, they looked like hyperactive automatons, or spasmodic worker bees at some nightmarish factory from the future.

Many of the 1970s punk and new wave acts embraced standard-issue nihilism, but Devo came equipped with a different philosophy: de-evolution, or, the "important sound of things falling apart." Relying heavily on satire, the band rejected the notion that capitalism was helping society to progress — they argued that things, in fact, were regressing. As they put it in their de-evolution song/manifesto, Jocko Homo, "They tell us that we lost our tails/Evolving up from little snails/I say it's all just wind in sails/Are we not men?/We are Devo!"

They poked fun at corporate branding, the culture of consumption, over-reliance on technology, conformity and, well, a collective stupidity and intellectual laziness that, in their eyes, was becoming pervasive.

More than 30 years after their Jocko Homo heyday, Devo are back touring, and next April they'll release their first album of original material since 1990. Group co-founder Gerald Casale believes they're even more relevant in this century.

"The things we saw beginning back then permeated the entire society top to bottom, especially in America," he explained in a recent interview. "So de-evolution is real, and I think the kids today who discovered us because of iTunes and YouTube are entertained and amused. They get it; the music sounds modern, because so many bands today were entertained by that lexicon of sound."

Contemporary acts such as LCD Soundsystem, the Ting Tings and MSTRKRFT owe a debt to Devo, who combined early synthesizer and electronic drum innovations with some aggressive guitar work that didn't feel out of place in the punk era. Another audio trademark was the adenoidal vocals of lead singers Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh — on one hand, filled with genuine rage and dripping with sarcasm, and on the other, robot-like, almost inhuman.

The Devo concept came together in the early 1970s at Ohio's Kent State University, where Casale and Mothersbaugh were visual art students. "It was an art project, Art Devo. We were revelling in mass culture — things like horrible newspaper ads, cheap merchandise, silly ad graphics, mixed with serious art school ideas that came from studying Bauhaus, Cubism, surrealism and Russian constructivism. It was the mixture of the high and the low."

Band members Mark Mothersbaugh, left, and Bob Casale perform at the Royal Festival Hall in 2007. (Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

Casale himself was witness to the infamous 1970 shootings at Kent State, where four students were killed and another nine wounded by the Ohio National Guard during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. The event had a profound impact on the band. "When you're 19 and see that the National Guard got away with it, you see another 19-year-old shot for real, the exit wound and the blood — not movie violence and what that looks like — something happens. It was no more Mr. Nice Guy."

It turns out that the music was almost an afterthought. "We were never thinking about a band, we were thinking about an idea. When we started applying music to Devo, we wondered, 'What would Devo music sound like?' And the next thing we know, we're becoming a rock band playing in clubs."

Their striking visual presentation — which included groundbreaking music videos that predate MTV by five years — won them some high-profile "devo-tees." After catching Devo's first New York show in 1977, David Bowie declared, "This is the band of the future." Neil Young also became a fan early on, while Brian Eno produced their 1978 debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

The group spent most of the Reagan era as a cult band, doling out their trenchant satire to an alternative music fan base. But with the smash success of the 1980 single Whip It, the Bauhaus-inspired art school grads suddenly found themselves rising up the pop charts.

"It wasn't about sadomasochism or masturbation, like people thought," Casale says of the song. "It was making fun of all that motivational stuff that says you're No. 1, like Tony Robbins. I read a quote once from Bob Dylan — it was something about how people misunderstood Like a Rolling Stone, and he says he was glad they did because if they hadn't, it wouldn't have been a hit. Whip It was like that. It wasn't about that other stuff, but people thought so, and that's probably a good thing."

So can Devo rise again in this millennium? In terms of their subject matter and sound, it appears as if the 21st century might have been the group's natural home all along. With characteristic tongue in cheek, Casale claims that the band is embracing music industry corporatism on their new album, which, perhaps tellingly, will be released next April Fool's Day.

"The big difference with this album is we ran the music up the flagpole. We hired an ad agency and did focus groups to see what part of us people liked," he notes, revelling in his latest satire. Clearly, Devo's role as provocateurs is still viable, so long as the music business resembles a soulless assembly line.

"You'll see those focus groups in the next year on the web, what the kids have to say about us. We never cared about that before; we only cared about our hermetically sealed world. Now we want to take that world to the next level."

Devo's deluxe reissues of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! and Freedom of Choice are available now.

Greig Dymond writes about the arts for CBC News.