Punk rock tends to threaten even punk fans, to the extent that arguments over formal purity vs. innovation vs. some obscure artistic ideal consume the scene to a ridiculous degree. Deciding what punk isn’t makes it easier to ignore music that’s too rough or too catchy; it also allows people to wave off the new with a knowing “it’s been done” or “that’s all hype.” Consequently, punk archivists have a hard time maintaining an illusion of impartiality. They either purposefully narrow the focus, as with the recent New York Noise compilation, which is dedicated to the fusion of punk, funk and the avant-garde at the dawn of the ’80s. Or they become ridiculously expansive, as with Rhino’s four-CD box set No Thanks!: The ’70s Punk Rebellion, which ranges from the garage-rock to the post-punk eras, spanning continents and scenes.

At least New York Noise has a clear point of view: It establishes the continuity between the decay of the city’s early punk scene and the rise of hip-hop. That intersection of art and primitivism is relevant to what’s going on in New York City today, with bands like The Strokes and The Rapture, who have seized their civic legacy. The Rapture’s new album Echoes is like a pastiche of New York Noise and the British post-punk scene of the early ’80s. Making a theme out of repetition, it maintains a mostly steady pattern of disco thump, guitar slash and call-and-response choruses, expressing faith in straight lines and inexorability. It’s a shifting, conceptual take on how the hip sounds of two decades ago once described a world of frenzied decadence and self-pity (and perhaps do so again).

The Strokes’ latest, Room on Fire, essentially copies the Velvet Underground/ Television gutter-guitar frenzy of the band’s hyped debut Is This It? Once any initial disappointment that the album is no great leap forward wears off, though, what remains is the kick of hearing 11 new songs’ worth of Julian Casablancas’ sleazy rasp, Albert Hammond’s snaky guitar leads and the pingy rhythms of the rest of the quintet. The stubble-scratch and sweat-on-leather aroma of late night anthems like “Reptilia” and “The Way It Is” diminish complaints about their derivative origins.

But the complaints are coming anyway, because that’s the way the punk game goes. It’s become common to write off the current New York underground rock scene as prematurely discharged, doomed to blaze brightly and burn out fast. But while the parade of angular, funky post-punk bands has gone from exciting to suspicious in less than two years, the cycle of rock revolutions is such that an intense back-to-basics period usually clears away the clutter and enables the music to head in new directions. And since that hasn’t happened yet, better to hang on.

It’s usually more rewarding to ride the zeitgeist than to buck it anyway, especially since, as Rhino’s No Thanks! set demonstrates, edgy rock movements have always contained appropriators and charlatans, and that it was often the one-song or one-album flame-outs who formed a scene’s backbone. No Thanks! clarifies how many of the original U.K. punks were accomplished musicians who used the fad to make their name and then rode straight into new wave and techno-pop when those became the craze—which means that many of the ideas that spilled out of the various scenes of the late ’70s never came to fruition.

Many of those ideas were the effect of bands picking up threads abandoned in the mid-’60s when acid rock began pushing the music toward pomposity. Rock history is a chart of sudden leaps forward and purposeful retracing of steps; young bands regularly return to the moment they think the music went sour and start anew. That’s what The Rapture and The Strokes and their ilk are doing, and it’s not like it’s a new phenomenon. Indie rockers in the U.S. have been circling back for much of the last decade, scooping up bits of discarded pop and working them into personal mosaics. The Strokes, The Rapture, et al. are really just indie writ large, with more swagger.

It was about time too. Indie-rock self-deprecation has become insufferable. The next wave of indie-rockers seem to be learning by example, though, judging by inspired, invigorating new records by the likes of The Long Winters and The Rosebuds. The former’s When I Pretend to Fall is a lovely synthesis of Buffalo Springfield, R.E.M. and Elephant 6, while the latter’s Shine a Light is ideal for punk clubs, short car rides and those who dig the effortless cool of the first Modern Lovers record or Marshall Crenshaw’s debut.

The current kings of the indies are The Shins, whose Chutes Too Narrow is a compendium of cool sounds, starting with the opening track “Kissing the Lipless,” which pages through a catalog of pretty guitar noise while bandleader James Mercer’s high, pinched vocals come to a thrilling swell. As a lyricist, Mercer follows the indie-rock model of clever stream-of-consciousness à la Stephen Malkmus and Robert Pollard; as a musician and arranger, he worships at the altar of “melancholy beauty” ’60s icons like The Zombies, Love and The Beach Boys. But Mercer displays an awareness of how to synthesize that style with the pleasant atmospherics of modern rock, and he’s a whiz at melody, gently pulling his audience through dreamily abstract, hooky numbers like “Saint Simon” and “Turn a Square.”

The Strokes’ higher profile makes them, in some ways, more important than The Shins, since what The Strokes do impacts the culture right now. But in other ways, The Shins are more important than The Strokes, since the tastemakers who often decide what’s worthy of canonization are taking The Shins more seriously. Either way, it’s best to pay attention to both, since both are actively engaged in the musical debate over how much to revive underused old sounds and how much to reflect the new.

Then there are acts like The Fiery Furnaces and Constantines who are bursting the continuum. The former’s Gallowsbird’s Bark is a punky, bluesy, medieval folky take on pub rock, sounding by turns like P.J. Harvey, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, The White Stripes, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Spoon and maybe Jethro Tull (minus the flute). It’s an insistent and confident record, the sound of traditional British folk music being systematically demolished. Constantines’ second album, Shine a Light, embraces classic rock bravado and splatter-punk nightmarishness. Lead singer-guitarist Bry Webb sounds like he’s been shouting across a room for an hour and can now only hoarsely grunt, while the rest of his quintet balance bounce and punch as well as any punk act since Archers of Loaf.

Both bands are obsessed with wreckage. The Fiery Furnaces use multiple tools of destruction, from the tumbling drums, discordant piano and stinging blues guitar of “Leaky Tunnel” to the minimal piano-and-drum-machine funk of “Bow Wow.” Meanwhile, Shine a Light is a jarring but tuneful vision of desolation that’s like dancing late at night in an overheated, off-the-books hideaway with the doors barricaded.

If listeners are open to these records at all, they may come out the other side into the future of rock, where the music’s feelings of alienation and personal takes on beauty live on in a wholly new way. Or almost wholly, since as punk revivalism shows, rock never really has been wholly anything.