Anamanaguchi, perhaps the most popular chiptune band of all time, were welcomed as ComicCon royalty recently, celebrating two decades of soundtrack synergy with a free performance alongside frontman Peter Berkman’s appearance at a Scott Pilgrim EX panel. They’ll return to San Diego next month for a very different kind of gig at the divey downtown club Casbah, which is sweaty, dimly lit, and subject to deafening airplane noise the moment you step outside. If ComicCon represents their past, Casbah is more suited to the identity that Anamanaguchi have adopted on their new album Anyway: guitar-toting indie-rock lifers happy to pack out your city’s 200-capacity venue on any given Saturday night.

Anamanaguchi albums are so infrequent that they’re mission statements by default. Endless Fantasy was 76 minutes long; its follow-up arrived six years later and was simply called [USA]. Anyway doesn’t ask skeptics to forget everything they know about the group; rather, it just replaces the expansive, intimidating lore of its past with more familiar touchstones. Yes, that’s the American Football house on the cover. Yes, lead single “Darcie” is a waltzing alt-rock tribute to the co-founder of Polyvinyl, which offers the American Football house as an AirBnb for artistic retreats. Yes, “Darcie” does sound like Weezer—the Pinkerton version, with Dave Fridmann as their engineer. Anyway was recorded at Fridmann’s Tarbox Studios and in his proverbial wheelhouse of redlined drums and compressed synth lines, giving Anamanaguchi the jagged edges to satisfy their newfound taste for rock candy.

Despite the album cover, there’s no “’90s Midwest emo” in Anamanaguchi’s revamped sound, though there is plenty of ’90s emo from the Midwest—bands like the Get Up Kids and the Anniversary, too sentimentally rooted in punk to lose the genre tag, even as they strove to pass as synth-spiked power-pop. Anamanaguchi’s rebrand kicks off with a song about the unpredictable spark of inspiration, but they don’t invoke comparisons to blowtorches or fireworks displays. It’s called “Sparkler,” something more suitable for Anamanaguchi’s tastes—the charming, the lo-fi, the handheld. Likewise, “Sapphire” looks wistfully back on their roots schlepping “Game Boys and guitars on the A Train” to DIY gigs, archived files “small and full of life.”

Conversely, “Valley of Silence” might be the first time Anamanaguchi have gone for big and full of sorrow; if not for Songs of a Lost World, it might be the most convincing Disintegration cosplay of the past 30-odd years. But while the former is the work of a band revisiting its own strengths, “Valley of Silence” is Anamanaguchi discovering an entirely new context. The song’s doleful cinematic scope contrasts with the ugly realities that ground Anyway in the here and now: In “Rage (Kitchen Sink),” Berkman confronts the black hole of someone’s all-encompassing joylessness, and in the deceptively triumphant closer “Nightlife,” he sings, “Bodies of children lie covered in gauze”; it’s not hard to guess which children he’s referring to.