“I think we’ve been waiting for and looking for and hoping for this generation’s ‘Ohio.’ ”

That was David Crosby, the ’60s folk-rock icon who happens to have no use for punk, in an interview this week.

Anti-Flag is the just kind of band we’d look to for some kind of raging anti-Trump anthem, but the Pittsburgh political band shies away from it on “American Fall,” its 10th album and follow-up to 2015’s “American Spring.”

Echoing what Tim McIlrath of Rise Against said in another recent interview, Anti-Flag bassist Chris #2 says, “We have learned that it’s not about a person. Trump is a symptom, he’s not the disease. It’s far more about us collectively combating the disease than the symptoms,” adding “these songs live longer than presidents.”

Anti-Flag never mentions Trump by name, choosing instead to beat the drum on issues like the politics of distraction (“American Attraction”), consumerist culture (“Liar”), covert racism (“Racists”) and post-traumatic stress disorder among military drone operators (“Digital Blackout”).

There also are surprises in the sonic approach. Rather than opting for the raw punk sound that’s come out of their studio in Shaler, “American Fall” (coming Friday) was cut in Los Angeles with Good Charlotte’s Benji Madden giving it brighter melodies, lots of gang vocals and more of a pop-punk sheen.

“We’re constantly trying to write the best song we can write,” Chris says, “and we met Billy Bragg, decades ago, and he told us ‘You catch more flies with honey.’ He essentially sat us down and said, ‘Kids, you can have the most important message in the world, but no one’s going to pay attention to it unless it’s a good song.’ So the idea is, ‘How do we structure this the right way, how do we make these moments memorable so that when you’re anywhere in the world, the thing that you’re humming or the constant that you’re believing in is a message of empathy, a message of action. I think it’s something we’re getting better at.”

The beauty of having an outside producer, he says, is having “another set of ears in the room to bounce things off of.”

The first thing that bounces off the listener is a big, midtempo lead track, “American Attraction,” will have longtime fans wondering whether Mike Ness is doing a guest vocal. It’s just Anti-Flag singer Justin Sane digging deeper.

“It’s the lowest range he’s ever sung in,” Chris says. “Part of that was we wanted something uncomfortable for us, as ridiculous as that sounds. We’ve all been discomforted by distraction politics. It’s the one thing that’s been forced down our throats since the beginning of the election. It’s the idea that the things that are happening in front of our face are the most important. Meanwhile, there are corporate smash-and-grabs that are happening daily, rollbacks of regulations that are allowing people to squeeze the environment like a lemon. How do we in a 2½-minute song get that message across? Part of that was us being as discomforted as it seems. Even the repetition of that riff, it felt like 2017, it felt modern.”

Three songs in, on “When the Wall Falls,” Anti-Flag does a Bragg-style fake-out before breaking into a Rancid-style ska-punk groove, something they haven’t done since 1996.

“It was on ‘Die for the Government,’” Chris says, “and it was one of my favorite Anti-Flag songs, called ‘Summer Squatter Go Home.’ When we play [‘When Wall Falls’] live, I’ll make a joke that it’s a byproduct of us touring with Reel Big Fish and Less than Jake over the last year and a half, but really the song started all downstrokes and reminiscent of ‘London Calling’ and it felt too dark. Once we changed it to ska-punk and those upstrokes, it totally changed the perspective of the song and it became like, we can win, there is optimism.”

How challenging is it to slide back into ska-punk 20 years later?

“I say this in the kindest way, but I’m the only one in Anti-Flag that has any groove to them,” Chris says, cracking up. “They’re all very straightforward. Pat [Thetic] lays four on the floor. It was a challenge figuring out which of the guitar players was going to do that one, but I will say Chris Head has got it now. It’s in his realm.”

Not that Anti-Flag wants to get too far away from its classic, more rigid punk style.

“I think that’s where a lot of our tension comes from. We’re well aware that we’re constantly pushing ourselves to play at the edge of our ability, and that push to do that means it can go off the rails at any moment, and I think that’s what a lot of people connect with, is that you hear that tension and you can feel it.”

“Digital Blackout,” the closest Anti-Flag gets to Rage Against the Machine, deals with the unusual subject of drone warfare trauma on the operators.

“The drone war is sold to the average American as being clinical or tactical or a clean war. You see a bad guy, you blow him up and go on to the next one.”

A friend of theirs, protest folk singer Ryan Harvey, told them of a digital soldier friend who suffered from PTSD.

“We felt like we had to tell that story. Rage Against the Machine influenced it a bit, but there’s that idea that you can have bouncy punk rock song, and I think ‘Digital Blackout,’ is our best version of that.”

For pure thrashy chaos, there’s “Liar,” the fastest Anti-Flag song to date with a message about consumerism that might get buried in the rush.

“We have to take note of the way we’re spending money, the things we put in our body, the people that we trust with our livelihoods,” the bassist says. “That’s how we’re going to get real and positive change.”

The title of the closing song, “Casualty,” hints at a gloomy finish, but, instead, it’s a rousing victory song, sonically reminiscent of Everclear, where they do a gang vocal of “Try to shut us down/but we won’t be another casualty.”

“We wanted to come back to the idea that there should be a lot of optimism in the fact that we can write our own future moving forward,” Chris says. “I feel like we can use music as an escape or we can use it as a way to really feel free. And that’s the kind of world I want to be a part of. It’s never about, ‘We’re gonna have the show, these things don’t exist here, so don’t worry about them.’ It’s about, ‘We’re having a show, these things don’t exist here because you’ve done the work to eradicate them from your lives. Now, how do we extend that work to the dinner table with mom and dad, the job we go to, the school that we go to?’ “

Anti-Flag is wrapping up a tour and will bring the Silence = Violence Tour with Stray from the Path to Mr. Smalls on Feb. 9.

First Published: November 2, 2017, 4:00 a.m.