CHICAGO — Chumbawamba will celebrate their 20th anniversary in January by doing what they do best — waxing political on an album that explores new territory for the tubthumping anarchist rave rockers.

The as-yet-untitled release will combine dance tracks with samples of British folk tunes, singer Dunstan Bruce said Tuesday at the Chicago Underground Film Festival at the famed Biograph Theater. His remarks accompanied the Stateside premiere of Chumbawamba's documentary, "Well Done. Now Sod Off."

"The last album flopped terribly," Bruce said of 2000's WYSIWYG (see "Chumbawamba Returning With New Album, Bassist"). "It was a real cut-and-paste album. This is more a collection of songs. It's more of a post-punk album than an in-your-face album."

WYSIWYG's poor sales cost the Chumbas their European record deal with EMI, though their American label, Universal Records, is scheduled to release their new album early next year — a shocker even to Bruce.

"Universal must have a lot of copies [of WYSIWYG] in a warehouse somewhere," he joked. In all seriousness (which with this band, as their documentary shows, isn't terribly serious), Chumbawamba have quit trying to top the charts with another "Tubthumping."

"We've given up trying to figure out what makes a radio-friendly single," Bruce said. "We've tried and it doesn't work. We don't know, so we just do what we want to do." As fellow singer Alice Nutter says in "Sod Off," "We get a lot of crap for being a one-hit wonder, but we always expected to be a no-hit wonder."

Like all the band's previous recordings, the new album features political statements likely to stir up controversy, at least in their British homeland. One track attacks U.K. law enforcers for shooting and killing a man they believed was armed, but who was actually carrying a table leg in a paper bag.

"Well Done. Now Sod Off" explains Chumbawamba's nonconformist ideals and chronicles the eight-member punk collective through their years of communal living and political activism, which peaked at 1998's Brit Awards when they doused England's deputy prime minister with water.

Directed by Ben Unwin, "Sod Off" is as much comedy as political statement, however. Bruce and cohorts are hilarious as they reminisce about their shoplifting contests — who could steal the strangest item? — before each gig. Bruce also laughs his way through several reviews and letters slamming Chumbawamba. One critic wrote, "Everyone should hear this album to know what horrible music sounds like." Another ended a sarcastic review, "Well done Chumbawamba. Now sod off!" — hence the film's title.

According to Bruce, the group originally planned to release a compilation of their videos until the Sex Pistols' "The Filth and the Fury," Fugazi's "Instrument" and Radiohead's "Meeting People Is Easy" inspired them to do a documentary: "Besides, our videos aren't that good anyway."

"When we had the success with 'Tubthumping,' a lot of people thought that was our first album. We wanted to let people know we had a huge history," Bruce added. "And now when our kids think we were really square, we can say, 'This is what I did for the punk war.' "

Chumbawamba will continue to show "Well Done. Now Sod Off" at film festivals for the rest of the year. Next year they hope to broadcast it on television overseas.