When it comes to the Iguanas, patience is a virtue. With If You Should Ever Fall on Hard Times, the New Orleans group has proven once again that it’s worth the wait. The album is the group’s first work in five years, making it the first since Hurricane Katrina shook up both the city and the band’s members. (Many in the group scattered to other cities; saxophonist Derek Houston is no longer a member.)

This extended down time is reminiscent of the build-up to 2003’s Plastic Silver 9-Volt Heart, yet the circumstances are remarkably different. On that album, the Iguanas forever laid to rest that they were New Orleans’ lightweight equivalent of Los Lobos, a party band once signed to Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Records that mixed its Tex-Mex influences with classic Crescent City R&B grooves. They did this even while embracing Los Lobos contemporary Dave Alvin, who performed on the title track. 9-Volt turned out to be not only the band’s best album, but also, arguably, one of the best albums to come out of New Orleans in the new millennium.

By contrast, If You Should Ever Fall on Hard Times should forever lay to rest any notions that the Iguanas can’t be a New Orleans band, even when it doesn’t adhere to any preconceived notions about how one is defined as such. The Iguanas play with some of the more conventional New Orleans sounds—swinging jazz horn arrangements, greasy funk, Latin shuffles—but the result is something that skews more toward the possibilities of roots rock and that genre’s own hard-to-find boundaries. So for every accordion flourish that romances tunes such as “Celos Con Mezcal,” there is the early Rolling Stones vibe that pushes “Dancing for Dollars Again” beyond the party anthem realm. “Sour Grapes,” with its syncopated guitar licks and tight horn riffs, could be mistaken for a Booker T & the MGs instrumental until the vocals kick in.

Co-founder Rod Hodges is responsible for those guitars and vocals, and he has an uncanny ability to use them to complement each other. On the opening and title track, Hodges fuzzes up the guitar and smoothes out his vocals over hand claps with the upbeat promise of being there when needed: “If you should ever fall on hard times I’ll come running… I’ll come running straight to you.” Familiar Iguanas producer Justin Niebank recorded the band in Nashville and New Orleans, much in the way he did the previous album, and once again tries to go for a live-setting feel with minimal tricks.

Despite its belated timing and reassuring title, If You Should Ever Fall on Hard Times is not so much a post-Katrina album as much as it is an attempt to return a pre-Katrina path. It’s heartening to hear the Iguanas get back on that path, however crooked, to present another head-turning effort.