Since the late ’00s, this Milanese soundtrack-obsessed funk combo has left a mark on three successive decades with the sort of dedication that pushed them from novelty appeal into a greatness in their own right. Sure, they got their kicks off upbeat jazz-funk renditions of the scores to car-chase cop flicks and colorfully morbid giallo thrillers of the ’70s, but the longer and deeper they tapped into that well, the more the air of potential gimmickry dissipated to reveal the enthusiastic music-geek chops at their core. While that culminated in some more “legit” opportunities in the film-score world — a soundtrack for police procedural series Blanca in 2021, and a two-volume in-memoriam Ennio Morricone tribute Scacco Al Maestro the following year — Nouvelles Aventures, more than any album before it, reinforces the fact that they don’t need direct cinematic motivation to stir the imagination. In fact, it’s the inverse — these are songs that feel like they should inspire films, wordlessly mood-driven yet vividly evocative in how they cross-pollinate their wide-ranging influences. Get a load of how the elegaic piano-driven voyage of “Apnea” abruptly but intuitively shifts gears into drum’n’bass rhythms, the way the rumbling “Extraordinaire” immediately spurs visions of tense back-alley foot chases and then uses that velocity-heightening propulsion to elaborate on the best ways to erase the border between fusion and prog, or the nuances of “Novecento e mille” as it shifts the mood of its vintage-synth groove between shades of dread, tension, curiosity, and revelation. And while they sound great elaborating on the psychedelic side of their audio-filmic instincts, they’re also still given to putting together some of the most immediately catchy retromodern live-band funk 4,000 miles east of Dap-Tone’s Brooklyn — the Meters-in-Cinemascope “Dinamometro” and the overdriven mod rave-up “Bolero!” joining a long lineage of swaggering jams just waiting for a scene cool enough to score.