Decades are lived, and then scavenged: so goes the endlessly turning spit of popular culture. For the paranoid among us, this cycle seems to have accelerated in recent years, perhaps, in part, because the artifacts of those bygone eras—clothes, songs, television shows, ideologies—are now unmoored in time. Nothing is lost, or relegated to memory. It’s possible that we have never before lived in such close conversation with the recent past. (You want a scrunchie? I can get you a scrunchie.)

This week, the Breeders, one of the most important alternative-rock bands of the nineteen-nineties, released “All Nerve,” their excellent fifth album, and the first since “Mountain Battles,” released in 2008. Although the Breeders have been around for nearly thirty years, “All Nerve” feels contemporary, and not because the band abruptly updated its approach to music-making. Rather, the Breeders’ aesthetic has become omnipresent in the decades since its début.

Kurt Cobain famously listed “Pod,” the Breeders’ first record, from 1990, as having shaped his work with Nirvana. (“The main reason I like them is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric,” he told Melody Maker, in 1992.) Now the band’s influence is more ambient, but still plainly in evidence. Kim Deal’s cool, shifting rock dirges—the unpredictable structures Cobain admired—are what make the Breeders so thrilling to listen to, and so tempting to replicate. I can hear remnants of “Pod” on recent records by Courtney Barnett, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker; Deal’s songwriting has long been foundational to enduring arena bands like Radiohead and the National.

“All Nerve” notably reunites the lineup—the sisters and guitarists Kim and Kelley Deal, the drummer Jim Macpherson, and the bassist Josephine Wiggs—responsible for “Last Splash,” the band’s best and best-known LP, from 1993. Maybe because the Breeders started out as a side project for everyone involved—the first iteration was anchored by Kim, who was then playing in Pixies; Wiggs, of the Perfect Disaster; Tanya Donelly, of Throwing Muses; and Britt Walford, of Slint—its albums have always sounded gloriously unburdened. It’s the kind of liberation that a person indulges while on vacation—things that wouldn’t make sense on an ordinary day come to seem reasonable. Why not have a banana-daiquiri shot and then plunge down a zip line in your swimsuit?

I last spoke with the Breeders in 2013, on the twentieth anniversary of “Last Splash.” (The band was photographed, sopping wet, at the Metropolitan Recreation Center, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; it is still the only interview I’ve ever done while hugging a pool noodle.) After Donelly left the Breeders, to form Belly, Kim asked Kelley to forgo her salaried job as an analyst for a defense contractor, learn guitar, and join the Breeders on tour. Kelley’s clumsiness on the instrument became part of the Breeders’ sound; it gave “Last Splash” a wobbly, punk-rock quality. In the nineties, as now, virtuosity was not a particularly desirable attribute. (“Advertising looks and chops a must!” Stephen Malkmus hollered, sarcastically, on Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair,” from 1994.) “There’s something about somebody who doesn’t know,” Kelley told me. “They don’t add any finesse—there’s no affectation to their playing. That’s something we really value sonically. It sounds authentic and genuine. For me, it was never about ‘Oh, I have all this virtuosity, but I’m just going to put it away and carve my own path.’ I never had that. I’m still just all right, and it works for me.”

These days, what feels most remarkable about the Breeders is extra-musical: the band is anchored by three women in their fifties, none of whom, incidentally, chose to breed. They haven’t ceded their pulpit to a younger generation or disappeared into a domestic routine. Their tenacity is perhaps unsurprising. The Deal sisters grew up in the late nineteen-seventies, in Dayton, Ohio, where the local rock scene wasn’t especially open to young women. (“You know the NGA kids: No Girls Allowed,” Kim said later. “Motherfuckers.”) They may not have been welcome in the black-lit, tapestried basements where their male peers were frantically committing Led Zeppelin licks to memory, but they persisted, nonetheless.

As a result, the Breeders are a model not simply for the timelessness of good art—the ways in which ingenuity boomerangs—but for what women can accomplish, regardless of whether the culture ever rises up to support them. Kim Deal hasn’t done any of the things that we expect girls to do onstage—she never preened, confessed, flirted, demurred, or compromised. She writes rough, occasionally discordant, non-narrative songs about who knows what. (I can’t discern its meaning, but still laugh every time Deal spits, with great authority, “Wait in the car / I got business” on “Wait in the Car,” a new song.) Her voice is icy and sometimes disinterested, as if she requires little in the way of acceptance or exculpation. In the single “Cannonball,” from “Last Splash,” when she sings, “I’ll be your whatever you want,” it feels less about embodying someone else’s fantasy and more about removing herself from it entirely. It’s in this way that the Breeders remain a modern band.