By the time the floorboards of New York’s Bowery Ballroom stopped shaking Tuesday night, Wolf Parade had torched the notion that their return from hiatus was any kind of vanity play. You couldn’t be blamed for expecting that it would be: Six years removed from their last LP, five years removed from their last live performance (under their own name, at least), and nearly a decade removed from anything close to semi-mainstream relevance should not add up to what could be called a cathartic experience—and yet. They took nostalgia’s calming glow and doused it in gasoline, justifying the return of an aging band by playing more ferociously than the baby-faced acts they’ve inspired.

To be fair, for fans of indie rock, there’s arguably something to be nostalgic for—namely, a time when the term “indie rock” more closely correlated to a specific set of sounds, and a certain prevalence in music culture. The year that saw the release of Wolf Parade’s breakthrough, Apologies to the Queen Mary—2005—was bursting with albums that made good on the promise of indie rock’s potential to energize: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled debut (a real belle of the MP3 blogs), Separation Sunday from Jersey revivalists the Hold Steady, the bookish pop of the Decemberists’ Picaresque, Bloc Party’s urgent dance-punk on Silent Alarm, and the album that ushered in the mainstream’s approval of indie rock, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois.

Of those bands, Wolf Parade are most similar to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, both in their singers’ gnarly vocals and in the way they never quite managed to top their debuts. In 2015, CYHSY embarked on a victory tour, reissuing their self-titled—as Wolf Parade did with ATTQM this week—and performing the work in whole. But CYHSY had been touring and releasing music to little fanfare all the while; their blatant attempt to recapture the vibe of 2005 could be seen as novelty, even if it sold tickets. Wolf Parade frontmen Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner had been busy in the meantime, too: Krug with Sunset Rubdown and Moonface, Boeckner with Handsome Furs and Divine Fits. And yet when they returned to the banner of Wolf Parade after a five-year hiatus, it was something else. When tickets to their residencies in New York, Toronto, and London went on sale, they sold out immediately. The excitement at first seemed totally at odds with the band’s measurably small success, especially removed from the height of it.

It’s tough to say just why Wolf Parade muster such excitement. Reunions or anniversary tours are announced almost daily, this year heralding news of such engagements from Danzig and the Misfits, LCD Soundsystem, Guns N’ Roses, Puffy and Bad Boy, Thursday, At the Drive-In, Ween, Dresden Dolls and seemingly just today, Rage Against the Machine. Hell, gauging by the crowd at Tuesday’s show—the first of five this week—aging Brooklynites with disposable income are hungry for anything from decades gone by, eager to reach the vigorous heights of their youth. (At one point in the show, the band responded to a question about death, saying, “What do you mean? We’re the old ones,” and then, a second later added, “Well, you’ve gotten older, too.”) You would think it didn’t matter who took the stage, so long as they had sold out this room, or one like it, ten years ago.

Case in point: A considerable number of such dudes broke into a full-blown sing-along when Interpol’s “Evil” played between sets. But that excitement, as stoked as it was by spontaneity, paled when compared to the riotous reaction to Krug’s nervy shouting on the set’s opener, “Cloud Shadow on the Mountain”—and that’s a track from the band’s last album, the relatively uncelebrated Expo 86.