Take “Doubts,” an archetypal Pup song: corrosive drums by Zack Mykula, sturdy bass by Nestor Chumak, grinding guitar by Steve Sladkowski, and Mr. Babcock. It’s part whiny gripe, part right jab, part arena chant. And yet there is Mr. Babcock, shrieking out his laments amid it all:

I haven’t felt quite like myself for months on end

I spend more nights on the floor than in my own bed

And I never see my family or my friends anymore

I write more apologies than metaphors



Pup has imbibed lessons from emo and melodic pop-punk — submovements that have always, to some, felt like offenses — and woven them back into a more conventional framework. And as those sounds have burst into revival, the more traditional approach preferred by Pup has seemed outmoded by comparison. For the past five years, dating back to when the band was called Topanga, Pup hasn’t much wavered from its sound, finding occasional compatriots, like its sometime tour mates the Menzingers, but generally following its path alone.

Even when Mr. Babcock is in full self-defeating narrative mode, the rest of the band girds him with live-wire energy and breathless tempo. “Sleep in the Heat,” a love song that’s actually about Mr. Babcock’s pet chameleon, now dead — “You started falling apart/six months after you moved in” — is full of hard-slapping drums and guitars that keen and yaw.

Last month, the group played a typically ballistic live show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Crowd-surfers, already primed by the excellent opening band, Rozwell Kid, took to the skies almost immediately. Pup was unfazed. Onstage, the group plays with a phenomenal sloppiness, making even its more subdued songs sites of eruption. And Mr. Babcock howls even when he doesn’t need to, which is probably why he developed a potentially career-threatening cyst on his vocal cords last year. (The new album’s title comes from what the first doctor he consulted about the problem told him about his singing; naturally, he sought a second opinion.)