Sydney’s Brent Griffin has been making music as Spod since 1995 but, he says, “I’ve never thought about this stuff out loud before.”

More than a stage name, Spod is a loosely worn character: a wild party-starter, a joke, an absolute in charisma and confidence with a loyal cult audience. Mostly, he’s been renowned for the chaotic, high-octane electroclash party sets he’s played for more than two decades; shows packed with confetti, streamers, glitter, backup dancers and red roses handed out to the audience mid-set. With fans including Henry Rollins, Ariel Pink and Jeremy Neale, his is the ultimate stage presence, which evangelised partying years before Andrew WK made the concept his oeuvre.

But his fourth album, Adult Fantasy, is something else: a nostalgic new-wave record that he began work on eight years ago. Released last week, it comes with an accompanying “TV special” that revels in its lo-fi aesthetic, filmed live to tape by Alex Smith (who has worked with Manic Street Preachers, Tori Amos, Peaches and Kylie Minogue); and a 46-minute closing track, which aims to set a world record for the most number of soloists (35, including Rollins, Ariel Pink and Jason Lytle from Grandaddy).

Spod has always been big on concepts. Before this album was 2014’s Taste The Sadness: a song-by-song tonal flipside of his 2003 debut Taste The Radness, where his party boy character (“this big suburban dude thinking he’s a sex symbol”) is transposed into an unsuccessful later life, lonely and hated by his kids. The song Letz Dance becomes Last Dance; Totally Rad becomes Totally Sad; and F**k Yeah!! becomes Hell No.

Griffin’s is a particular creativity, delivered with an envious degree of confidence. So it’s startling for him to reveal, after almost 25 years of making party, that there’s an immense discomfort driving it all that he has never publicly discussed.

“I need to feel out of my depth. I need to reverse-engineer things, whether that’s my own anxiety or fear,” he says.

In early interviews, Griffin’s responses were given in-character, using an affected dialect that takes Snoop Dogg through Greater Western Sydney. (From 2003, on what to expect at a Spod gig: “Luv, power, flowerz, glitter, bubblez, freedom, dancing, hotness, radness and beatz that’ll snizap yo nizeck!”)

The character stopped doing press a long time ago, but when he speaks to the media Griffin still regularly deflects analysis with jokes. This time, taking it seriously, he wrote notes to try and understand his own work first. “It’s the first [interview] where I’m like, ‘Alright, I’ll just … I won’t be an idiot’.”

Spod shows have ranged from shambolic assaults of unrelenting bravado to absurd operas of sad-dad ballads, but like his conceptual works, they’re mostly unplanned. “It would be nice to know it’s going to be fine. I’ve never felt that,” he says. “[For me], It’s always just like, ‘alright, this could be the end of everything. This could be the last show’. Every time. Pure terror.

“I think I combat that by just going extra hard. That anxiety — it’s always just bashing against a wall of anxiety, and getting through the other side.”

Adult Fantasy, he says, is partly about “the delusion of still doing Spod, as old as I am, for as long as I have.” Griffin is 44 with a two-year-old daughter, but “it’s the same unit,” he says. “I wanted to show that it’s the same guy, transposed to a different time, and how he’s dealing with it.

“It’s a weird balance of being exactly truthful to what I want to be doing and knowing what I can do, while still trying to have fun with it … [People think] ‘You’re a joke’, and that’s totally fine. I’m not fighting against people who just see the funny side of it — I’ll take anything. If you just think I’m oblivious to what I’m doing, that’s even better. That’s where I kind of want to be: where someone who sees me for the first time doesn’t know if I could support myself, or feed myself, or if I’m just an absolute maniac.”

More than a mask to conceal his anxieties, the character of Spod has long been a key to Griffin’s creative practice. But his new record, he says, is the most Brent Griffin Spod album he’s done. He set no creative limitations as he wrote it, meaning, “it could be completely honest, embarrassing, whatever”, and has “a lot of lyrics that aren’t funny”.

Make Things Right, for instance, is the song of a father warning his son about going out into the real world – but in fact it’s more personal.

“[That song] is more about my terror of going out. Social anxiety and stuff. ‘If you leave the house, you’re gonna die tonight,’” he says, quoting the lyric. “But I had to break it up to a father-son thing … [because] just singing to yourself, there’s nothing to explore with that.”

One of the record’s loveliest moments is its closing track, Golden Gaytime: a dreamy musing about an old man visiting his wife’s grave and having a nice ice cream as a treat. Its latter 41 minutes is a series of tribute solos performed by musicians including Ariel Pink, DZ Deathrays and Henry Rollins, and comedians like John Early, Claudia O’Doherty, and Doug Lussenhop. Asking people to be involved forced Griffin to confront another fear: collaboration.

“As soon as you add other people into it [I worry that] I’m gonna get outed as some kind of fraud. It’s a massive anxiety,” he says. “I don’t want to sit here and explain this dumb idea to someone, and … have them just go like, ‘why would you ever want to do that?’”

He even struggled asking his close friends to be on the track, worried they’d do it only out of obligation. In fact, he says, he finished the record a year ago – but crippling anxiety made him delay collecting the solos. “I’ll avoid contact with anyone, forever if I can. Which is terrible, because as soon as you open yourself up, it’s so much better.

“Ugh,” he says, shuddering. “Just talking about it is making my lips quiver … you don’t want to let people know why you do stuff. That destroys everything, a lot of the time.

“But if you try and control the narrative too much and be in character in an interview, it’s the fucking worst. At the beginning I would do that all the time, like make up a weird little language and stuff. It’s embarrassing to think back on. Can’t do that anymore. But I feel like I’m still being as ridiculous as ever.”

• Adult Fantasy is out now through Rice is Nice. Spod is playing at the Tote in Melbourne on 10 August, and at the Foundry in Brisbane on 24 August