THE title of the new Spiritualized CD, “Songs in A&E,” might seem to us Americans like an odd reference to a cable network. But in England, A&E is short for “accident and emergency,” and the title reflects the turmoil that confronted the disc’s completion when Spiritualized songwriter Jason Pierce was suddenly hit with a fierce bout of double pneumonia.

“I spent a long time in hospital – over a year,” says the melancholy Brit, whose CD drops on Tuesday. “The weirdest thing was trying to finish this record after that, because it suddenly became a collection of old songs. It was very difficult to find my way back.”

Pierce was saved, in a sense, by filmmaker Harmony Korine, who asked him to score his film “Mister Lonely.”

“I was probably at my lowest when I met him,” says Pierce, who named six brief musical interludes on the album “Harmony 1”-“Harmony 6” in tribute.

“Somewhere in writing the score for Harmony I decided to start writing my album in parallel. The film bled into the album, and the album bled into the film.”

The result was a sonic aura of illness as depicted in songs like “Death Take Your Fiddle,” which includes sounds of labored breathing and morbid lyrics.

“I had this idea that when I was in hospital, I would try and capture some of that in music,” he says. “There’s this low energy you get in places like hospitals, where you know there’s something really important going off and that people would run around screaming if they were allowed. But there’s this veneer of calm, and it creates this real weird energy.”