A new album by the original Alice Cooper band has long seemed inevitable. It just took a while — 52 years, actually — to get there.

“The Revenge of Alice Cooper,” which comes out Friday, July 25, marks the first time Cooper, guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith (with late guitarist Glen Buxton joining via technology) have released a full album of new material since “Muscle of Love” in 1973. After that, the band broke up, with Cooper starting a solo career with “Welcome to My Nightmare” the following year and 21 albums that followed.

The breakup was not pleasant at the time, of course, as you’d expect from a group that had been together largely since its members were teenagers in Phoenix. But Cooper and company contend that while hits such as “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy” maintained the band’s legacy, any acrimony was short-lived.

“We didn’t divorce as much as we separated,” explains Cooper, 77, who was born Vincent Furnier in Detroit and, while still living in Arizona, maintains hometown loyalties (including 2021’s “Detroit Stories”) album. “There was no anger, no bad blood — not for very long anyway.” Dunaway, 78, adds: “The breakup wasn’t what the band was about; the togetherness was. After all of these years, we’ve buried a lot of hatchets.

“We’re ready to explode with excitement because we’ve kept it secret for so long. It’s a real full-circle moment for us.”

That healing process actually started some time ago.

Bruce and Smith were special guests at the opening of one of the Alice Coopers’town restaurants in Phoenix in 1988, while all four living members performed during the band’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2011. That led to song collaborations on several of Cooper’s subsequent albums — “Welcome 2 My Nightmare” in 2011, “Paranormal” in 2017 and “Detroit Stories.” And on Oct. 6, 2015, the four played an eight-song set at Good Records in Dallas to celebrate Dunaway’s memoir “Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group.” The show was subsequently released as the “Live from the AstroTurf” album and DVD three years later.

Bruce, Dunaway and Smith also joined Cooper and his current band as special guests on the U.K. dates of the Spend the Night with Alice Cooper world tour.

“All of those things got everybody reacquainted,” Dunaway says. “‘Reacquainted’ is a weird term ’cause we’re so much like family, so it’s more like a family reunion. Then Alice and Bob (Ezrin) called and were talking about, ‘Oh yeah, we want to do an album,’ because there’s so many songs kicking around.”

Ezrin began working with the Cooper group in 1970, after it had moved from Los Angeles to a farm in Pontiac. There, he helped the band create its breakthrough album, 1971’s “Love It To Death,” as well as the subsequent “Killer,” “School’s Out” and the chart-topping “Billion Dollar Babies.” (He’s also produced nine of Cooper’s solo albums.) “We’ve worked together here and there over the years,” he says. “The boys played together … and every time it’s been a joy and complete pleasure, and kind of like going home. Obviously everyone’s older and more mature and more settled, but when we all get together and I watch the interplay between them, it’s like they just walked out of high school and were hanging out in the local cafe.

“They just revert to type. They revert to who they were as kids when they first got together … and make music together like they did 50-some years ago. So we finally decided, ‘Let’s just do a whole album, an Alice Cooper group album like we used to.”

Cooper adds that “it was very much like this was our next album after ‘Muscle of Love,’ just like, ‘OK, this is the next album.’ Isn’t that funny after 50 years? All of a sudden it just falls into place.”

The group began work on “The Revenge…” in August 2022 in Connecticut, where Dunaway and Smith reside. Other recording was done in Phoenix, Nashville, Los Angeles, Hollywood and Glendale, California, with Cooper’s vocals recording in Toronto. Filling Buxton’s role is Gyasi Heus, a Nashville player who was recommended to Ezrin by mutual friends in Nashville. “So we have the Alice Cooper group,” Ezrin says, “not with Glen Buxton, but with somebody who honors Glen Buxton.”

Gyasi had, ironically, purchased a cassette tape version of 1974’s “Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits” album at a yard sale just two months before Ezrin called. “I was totally thrilled to be a part of it and get to work with such an iconic band and to communicate musically together,” he says. “It’s super surreal, just an incredible honor to get to work with these guys. I’m not trying to replace (Buxton); I was just trying to fill the same kind of role he did in (the band).”

Buxton, who died in 1997 at the age of 49 — and to whom “The Revenge…” is dedicated — does appear on the album, however. The track “What Happened to You” was created from a riff on an old demo tape for a song he called “Astute Lobotomy” that Dunaway had preserved. “It was great that we salvaged it and made a song out of it,” says Bruce, 77. “Even though Glenn’s not with us, he’s with us, and it’s a really good song.” Buxton can also be heard on “Return of the Spiders 2025,” an upgraded remix of a track from the group’s second album, “Easy Action.”

Other homages to the past include another remix, of the “Titanic Overunderture” from the group’s 1969 debut “Pretties For You,” as well as a cover of the Yardbirds’ “I Ain’t Done Wrong” from 1965 — a collective band member favorite that the group covered during their early days as the Spiders on Phoenix. And Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger, a friend from the Cooper band’s earliest days in Los Angeles, guests on the first single, “Black Mamba.”

“I felt that if we’re gonna do an original Alice record, I want it to sound like the original Alice band,” Cooper says. “The original band has a darker sound and a heavier sound. It’s a very different personality, and I even sing differently when I sing with those guys. And it was much more of a band, where each one of us has a certain say.

“I think the best thing about this is normally Bob and I would go: ‘OK, wait a minute — that doesn’t necessarily fit. That shouldn’t go there.’ When we’re working with this band, we go, ‘No, let it go there,’ ’cause that’s what the original Alice Cooper Band did.”

Cooper, Dunaway, Smith and Bruce will gather on Thursday, July 24 in London for an album playback and Q&A hosted by composer Tim Rice. No other group plans have been determined, however, and Cooper has a full slate of touring with his band that runs into October (including an Oct. 2 stop at Pine Knob Music Theatre). Bruce echoes his bandmates’ sentiments when he says that “If (Cooper) asks, I’ll be there.”

Cooper — who’s been working on his next solo album with Ezrin — holds out the possibility that there may even be more music to come from the original lineup.

“Who says it’s a one-off album?” he notes. “I have no problem working with these guys all the time. Doing this again is great. I’ll always be up for that. … So let’s see what happens.”