ZZ TOP has been idling for a while. It tours regularly, playing the road and radio-tested base of its blues and boogie 1970s and ’80s catalog with such delicious control over sound and feel and medium-to-slow tempos that you wonder whether this band, in earthly-purpose terms, needs to do much else.


But it has not released a new album since “Mescalero,” in 2003. This week comes “La Futura,” an album that took three years to make. It was produced by Rick Rubin, whose sense of patience, and beard length, seems to line up with Billy Gibbons’s. 


Mr. Gibbons is one of the greatest guitarists alive. He is 62, and his band started in 1969. Mr. Rubin is known for having philosophical preproduction talks with older artists about how to recapture their former esprit. With ZZ Top all that was necessary was writing new songs and making them conform to Mr. Rubin’s meticulous perfectionism. “He follows no clock or calendar,” Mr. Gibbons said. “He’ll make you do it until it feels right and sounds right.”


Some new songs built upward from old ideas. One was “I Gotsta Get Paid,” a blues-hip-hop conjunction based on the 1999 track “25 Lighters,” a drug-dealing rap by Fat Pat and Lil’ Keke. (In the late ‘90s Mr. Gibbons spent time around the hip-hop producer DJ Screw, famous for his slowed-down remixes, and the rappers of Screwed Up Click, because they shared the same engineer, G. L. Moon.) Another was “Chartreuse,” which sounds like Part 2 of ZZ Top’s “Tush,” from 1975, in riff and in word; one lyric rhymes the title with the phrase “I like a big caboose.”


The result is kind of incredible: loud, immediate and knowing, full of subtle changes to simple song structures and the same pop-art representations of blues and Texas culture that the band has dealt in ever since it first put palmetto trees and a live buffalo onstage in 1976. (The long beards came along in 1983 for “Eliminator,” which has sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone.) ZZ Top appears at the Beacon Theater Wednesday.


For Mr. Gibbons, slowness is a strength, a process, even a theory. He has absorbed it from his blues-guitar hero Lightnin’ Hopkins, and perhaps from DJ Screw. “It’s a real uphill challenge to battle the white-guyness,” Mr. Gibbons said of himself. “White people get nervous and speed things up.”  But, he suggested, “you don’t have to be in a hurry because you ain’t got nothing to gain and you ain’t got nothin’ to lose. And that’s where the groove lies. Consider that as a mental concept for a second!”


Later, he paused and qualified. “I’m speaking not about seriousness — you can be way serious,” he said. “But there’s no advantage in getting hasty.”