Rick Rizzo, guitarist and songwriter of the Chicago band Eleventh Dream Day, is growing into contemplative maturity. He’s embarking on the traditional “difficult” later career phase, without ever having enjoyed the commercial success that ought to precede cult status. After more than a decade at the helm of the most consistently overlooked American band of recent years, priorities have changed.

“When we got back from our last big tour in 1993, things kind of fell apart. I decided to go back to school and do a teaching degree. I still enjoy playing, but it’s not a business.” But, in shrugging off professional restraints, Eleventh Dream Day suddenly find themselves with a liberated new sound and a vital new album, Eighth, released tomorrow.

Their 1988 debut, Prairie School Freakout, is one of the greatest rock albums of all time. Recorded in one all-night session, it sounds like Neil Young’s Crazy Horse fuelled with an amphetamine post-punk rush, a cast of unhinged small-town losers slouching through Rizzo’s closely observed narratives. When the band first played in Britain at London’s Camden Falcon in the spring of 1990, they had just signed to Atlantic Records, desperate for the next REM. Even then Rizzo displayed a cautious, guarded optimism that belied his youth.

He married the band’s drummer, Janet Beveridge Bean, and the second album, Beet, was completed at a more leisurely, major-label-funded pace. All Rizzo wanted from Atlantic was for Eleventh Dream Day to be left alone. As it turned out, the label left the band alone to the extent that an opportunistic lawyer might have encouraged them to sue for neglect. The three critically acclaimed records they made while signed to Atlantic were all deleted within a year. Rizzo explains: “This was back in the pre-Nirvana days and the ‘alternative’ department didn’t take us seriously.”

The band’s paymasters even failed to sneak them into public consciousness via the Trojan horse of the grunge explosion, which saw dozens of lesser bands don plaid shirts and seize their 15 minutes of fame. After their 1991 album, Lived to Tell, Eleventh Dream Day staged a mutiny. “We noticed a loophole that would get us out of the contract. But Atlantic’s president, Danny Goldberg, saw our request to leave on his desk and flew into Chicago to take us out to lunch.” Goldberg’s peace feast turned out to be only a light buffet, but it was enough to persuade Eleventh Dream Day to stay. 1993’s El Moodio saw their garage-rock template expand via hazy, extended tracks such as Honeyslide, but then Goldberg left Atlantic and the band was dropped.

Rick and Janet’s son was diagnosed with a rare glucose deficiency – only 12 cases have ever been recorded – and their grizzled lead guitarist, Wink O’Bannon, jumped ship. “Eleventh Dream Day was put on the backburner,” recalls Rizzo. In the meantime, Rizzo has been sitting in with Chicago luminaries such as Palace, Red Red Meat and Tara Key; Janet’s folksy acoustic duo Freakwater was appropriated into the indie-country movement; and bassist Doug McCombs developed a more spacious style with egghead experimental ensemble Tortoise.

So when a reconfigured Eleventh Dream Day released 1995’s Ursa Major on the independent label City Slang, they offered a unique new sound; that of a road-tested garage band with country harmonies and experimental ambitions.

The new album develops this weird hybrid. Classic guitar lines fuse with modern studio interference, and McCombs’ new-found confidence provides a groundswell of melodic bass leads. The band’s old sound turns inside out, with cyclical jazzy keyboards and dubby effects burying Rizzo’s incendiary guitar in the mix. Eighth, he explains, contains few “songs” as such: “I don’t pick up guitar as much as I used to. Things either evolve in the studio or disappear. We’re not a garage band now and I’m not 25 years old any more.” Only the acerbic Two Smart Cookies and the urgent melancholy of April recall Rizzo’s back catalogue of self-propelled story songs. “Two Smart Cookies is the oldest song on the record,” Rizzo says. “That kind of songwriting style is in my blood. I couldn’t change that.”

Lyrically, Eighth spins tales of regret and resignation, of a coming to terms with things. The final track, Last Call, might be taken for the band’s farewell note. “I got tired of your dark side, I got a sinking feeling, I swallowed air, closed my eyes…” sings Rizzo before a guitar break that sounds too tired to go anywhere: “…I’m disconnected, across the miles of wire, this could be the last time, and it’s past time, to let you go…”

When asked to recall the circumstances of the recording session for their debut album, Rizzo tells the story word for word the same as he did in 1990. “It was 3am and we wanted to stop but Janet was yelling ‘C’mon you pussies!’ ” But that was a long time ago. Eleventh Dream Day, more by accident than design, are unshackled from commercial considerations and free to pursue brilliant artistic whims. “Why should it stop if it’s still fun?” concludes Rizzo.