James Murphy, of LCD Soundsystem, performs in the band’s farewell show, in Madison Square Garden, in 2011. Photograph by Chad Batka / Corbis

In his novel “World So Wide,” published posthumously in 1951, Sinclair Lewis wrote, of the American sensibility, “They want to see one queen, once, and if another came to town next week, with twice as handsome a crown, she would not draw more than two small boys and an Anglophile.” Lewis built a career around criticizing what he understood to be a deeply inglorious (and distinctly American) myopia. Even in his time, it was presumed that there was something inherent to the national pneuma—some insatiable hunger tangled up in our foundation as a frontier country, our gnawing appetite for expansion—that prized the new and novel over the venerated and tried. We distrust institutions, demand innovation. Bore easily. Yet, in recent decades, it appears that something has shifted. Nostalgia is its own currency now. The present is marked by a gleeful, let’s-trot-it-out-again approach to the pop culture of the not-so-distant past. When it comes to beloved narratives—books, movies, stories of all stripes—we’re resistant to reckoning with a hard stop. It reminds us that all things in life are finite, fallible. That’s a pill so big it chokes.

And so, we spit it out. LCD Soundsystem, a band from Brooklyn, led by the vocalist and songwriter James Murphy, recently announced that it would be appearing on the main stage of this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, thus truncating a much-ballyhooed retirement that began in 2011 and lasted a measly five years. (They’re scheduled to appear alongside a newly reunited Guns N’ Roses, an iteration that will purportedly include both Axl and Slash.) Murphy, who came to prominence in New York first as a D.J., then as a producer and as a co-founder of DFA Records, started the band in 2001. Its eponymous full-length début, released in 2005, was a collection of exacting, twitchy songs as indebted to electronic music as they were to indie-rock, and reminiscent, in places, of the venturesome dance bands of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, such as Talking Heads, Liquid Liquid, and, to a lesser extent, Can. “LCD Soundsystem” was a loving manifestation of Murphy’s vast and enviable record collection, and it crystalized a certain subset of the city: young people trying to feel more, so that they could, ultimately, feel a little less.

As far as declarations of elective retreat go, LCD Soundsystem’s was elaborate. After releasing two more albums of punchy, deadpan dance rock, the band took to publicizing its (amiable) dissolution. That meant an epic, sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden, in which attendees were asked to dress in black and white. And then there was a film, “Shut Up And Play the Hits,” a moody documentary about the M.S.G. show, complete with a shot of Murphy sobbing (understandably) among vintage synthesizers. And then “The Long Goodbye,” a limited-run, five-LP boxed set further commemorating that same farewell show—it was released on Record Store Day in 2014, and elaborately feted via an “interactive gallery exhibition” at Rough Trade, a record shop and venue in Williamsburg. According to Pitchfork, the exhibit included framed photos, handwritten notes from fans, and “a small shrine to the band—replete with candles, flowers, and an empty bottle of Jameson.”

Then, last week, LCD Soundsystem unexpectedly clawed its way up from a very fresh grave. First came the mopey “Christmas Will Break Your Heart,” a new single released on Christmas Eve, then the Coachella announcement, and now promises of an album and even more shows. The band’s story, it turns out, is not really over, not yet—and the mourning, it was for naught. As often happens in our complex times, when news of the comeback broke, the Internet reacted, reacted to itself reacting, and then slammed into a brick wall and burst into flames. There was not, as Sinclair Lewis might have presupposed, a great deal of apathy. Some people were stoked. But many former acolytes replied with indignation. It was as if an ex-boyfriend, mere months after an aching, non-mutual breakup, had shot off an overly casual text inquiring after a hang. “New phone, who dis?” went the collective cry. Eyes narrowed. People felt tricked, swindled, deceived.

Murphy quickly responded in a note posted to the band’s Web site, in which he pleaded earnest innocence (all in lowercase letters, which everyone knows express more humility): “but in my naiveté i hadn’t seen one thing coming: there are people who don’t hate us at all, in fact who feel very attached to the band, and have put a lot of themselves into their care of us, who feel betrayed by us coming back and playing. who had traveled for or tried to go to the MSG show, and who found it to be an important moment for them, which now to them feels cheapened. i just hadn’t considered that. i know—ridiculous on my part.” Anyone who has felt a deep euphoria in response to a musical performance can understand why that last show might have meant something to people. There’s a great deal of gloom embedded in Murphy’s songs, but there’s self-liberation in them, too. I wasn’t in the crowd that night, but I can see how hollering a lyric like “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life” alongside eighteen thousand other dancing yahoos might facilitate catharsis.

Murphy closed the Madison Square Garden show with “New York, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down,” a sardonic, meandering lament for lost or sullied dreams. It was a poignant ending, and apropos. In “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” Murphy appears both awake and overwhelmed while performing it, surveying the crowd with bewilderment, as if the circumstances of his life didn’t quite square until that moment. Shots of the crowd catch faces gone doughy, slack with elation, as if they have just born witness to a true, contained miracle. A person locks away that kind of experience—fights for it. Protects it. Still, I suspect that the bitter feelings will soften. They likely already have. Others (Jay Z, Cher, Michael Jordan) have breached retirement without significant fallout. LCD Soundsystem did, after all, capture a zeitgeist better than nearly any other band. Two of its bigger hits, “Losing My Edge” (“But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent”) and “All My Friends” (“You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again”) express two devastating, fundamental anxieties: Am I important? Do I mean anything to anyone?

The same questions have likely plagued every generation to ever collectively come-of-age. But the way Murphy delivers those lines feels profoundly of his time and place. There—in his rawness and his disaffection, in a disdain that seems as likely to move inward as outward—is a pretty good approximation of what it was like to be alive in certain corners of New York City in the first decade of the new millennium. He comes at that feeling again on “I Can Change,” a cut from the band’s last studio release, “This Is Happening.” With its wincing chorus (“I can change, I can change, I can change, if it helps you fall in love”) and defeated implorations (“Dance with me until I feel all right”), the song plays like an actual last gasp: one final swing at transcendence before settling into a version of adulthood that resembles—from afar, at least—resignation.

Anyone who’s made it past the age of twenty-five knows what it feels like to confront a reality emphatically different from what you’d imagined for yourself. “Hoping and hoping and hoping that the feeling goes away,” is how Murphy handles the dissonance on “I Can Change.” LCD Soundsystem couldn’t reconcile that fission, but Murphy did name it. He gave it a beat. I suspect that, for some, when the band decided to hang it up, there was hope that those anxieties might be swept away, too—that, for a particular kind of young, neurotic New Yorker, the ending of this band might be curtains for a particular kind of young, neurotic New York life. The outcry over the band’s resurrection feels similar to the way we occasionally react when faced with evidence of a prior version of ourselves: there is recognition, confusion, some fear. And then there is the inescapable fact of who we are now.