Singer Exene Cervenka is somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin in a van carrying the Los Angeles punk band X from Milwaukee to Minneapolis when she answers the phone. She’s ready to talk about the tour she and her bandmates are calling The End Is Near and the new album they say is their last.

“We’re not going anywhere yet,” she says of the tour, which has the band booked well into 2025. “But yeah, we’re not going to do this anymore. Touring is hard.

“I love playing shows; I really do,” Cervenka says. “I love driving around America. I’ve been doing it my whole adult life, and I never want to stop and won’t. But the van rides, and the in and out of the hotels, and up and down the stairs of the clubs ... And you know, we don’t stay in the lap of luxury. So physically, it’s difficult.

“But when we’re onstage, none of that matters,” she continues. “We love doing it. I want to keep doing it until we absolutely cannot anymore.”

As The End is Near tour marches on, “Smoke & Fiction,” the band’s ninth and final studio album, recently arrived.

In separate calls, each member of X — Cervenka, 68, singer-bassist John Doe, 71, guitarist Billy Zoom, 76, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake, 68 — made clear they aren’t retiring just yet.

There will be shows here and there in the future. But they are taking a step back from the constant touring of the past 20-some years since the band reunited at the end of the ’90s.

“I don’t want to be part of something where the wheels are falling off,” Doe says of the decision to take a step back from the heavy tour schedules of the past two decades. “What we’re winding down is 75 or so dates a year, a lot of them in clubs. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think we can really sustain that.

“I want to go out while we’re strong,” he says.

“For me, I think my body already made that decision,” says Zoom, who successfully beat back cancer a decade or so ago.

“I’ve felt this in the past,” Bonebrake says of uncertainty about the future of X. “You wonder if it’s our last tour: ‘Well, this could be it; I don’t know.’ I’m not yet emotional because we’re still in it.

“In the past, whenever people have given us awards, like LA Weekly Lifetime Achievement, the Grammy something, my attitude is like, ‘You can’t retire us early. You can’t get rid of me yet.’ ”

“Smoke & Fiction,” a terrific record that X says is its last, sees the band sounding as strong and inspired as ever, its 10 songs harking back lyrically to the band’s early history, its sound closely following suit.

None of that was on purpose, Doe says.

“Well, this is gonna come as a real shock to you,” he says, laughing. “Literally, nothing about X is calculated. We just do stuff. We do stuff and think, ‘Oh, well, that works.’

“Billy didn’t have some grand plan to join a punk rock band and infuse rockabilly-style guitar playing, but he was the first,” Doe says. “And Exene and I weren’t looking for a singing partner, but it turns out very handy because you share the duties pretty equally. So it doesn’t get boring or physically taxing.”

While the record is reflective of X’s past, it’s not nostalgic, which is a distinction Doe, who with Cervenka writes the lyrics, is careful to make.

“We’re not pretending that everything was incredible and wonderful in the old days,” he says. “But there’s lines like, ‘Let’s go ’round the bend, get in trouble again.’ So you have this desire to see the other side, but maybe you’re not as foolish as you had been in the past.”

Cervenka says much the same, pointing to the new song, “Big Black X,” which closely chronicles the scene from X came, as a clear-eyed look at that moment in time.

“ ‘Big Black X,’ is a funny kind of romp around in the past and not at all nostalgic or wistful,” she says. “Just kind of going, ‘Hey, remember that time we did this crazy thing?’ ”

Doe points to the same song as a musical mirror of that time and place.

“ ‘Big Black X’ would be sort of No. 1 if someone asked me, ‘What was it like?’ ” he says. “I could say, ‘Well, if you have three minutes and some change, just listen to that.’ ”

The new record came so soon after 2020’s “Alphabetland” in part because the pandemic kept X from touring behind it, Bonebrake says.

“We said, ‘We’re not going to be able to do this forever,’ ” he says. “Let’s do one more and let’s promote it right. So basically we’re having a second chance to do what we should have done with ‘Alphabetland.’

“I mean, if we could do five more, that would be great,” Bonebrake says. “If I could live forever, that would be fantastic. And we’re still playing well, but we get aches and pains. You just know you can only do so much for so long and do it well.”

Zoom, who avoids unnecessary words like he does unnecessary guitar notes, says he hasn’t really considered the historic roots of “Smoke & Fiction.”

“I haven’t really gotten around to listening to the words yet,” he says, and laughs. “I’m still trying to remember the chords and the arrangements. I don’t pay much attention to the lyrics. That’s not my job.”

Their fandom was never big enough to make them superstars, but with its steady touring in later years, X has come to view many fans like family. And that connection will be missed, they say.

“I’ve met thousands and thousands of people because I would always hang out in the crowd,” Cervenka says. “I always go out with people after the show: ‘Hey, let’s go to this old man bar. You’ll love it. We can get some Hamm’s beer and some whiskey, and then we’ll go play pool.’ I just would always have so much fun.”

For Zoom, the step back from touring and recording brings mixed feelings.

“In some ways, it’s a relief,” he says. “And in other ways, I’ll miss the audiences. Our fans have been coming so many years, it’s kind of like a family reunion when you go on tour.”

To the members of X, the fans have always seemed like kindred spirits, restlessly looking for something fresh, exciting, different.

“They’re accessible, but they’re weird. Each one of our members offers something different,” Doe says.

“Lyrically, and maybe musically, we appeal to outsiders,” he says. “They feel different and can be anyone, it just doesn’t matter. We do have a pretty, pretty broad appeal by our fan base.

“That’s something to be proud of, I think.”