Last week, I was in Boston to give a book reading, and after the event, I went to South Station to get a midnight bus back to New York. In the bus station, I heard an older woman, probably seventy, talking to a younger woman excitedly about “chiptune.” I was passing the pair on the way to the A.T.M., and I wasn’t sure I had heard correctly, but on my way back, the older woman was still going. “You really should hear it,” she said. “It uses video-game systems to make music.” Her eyes were shining like marbles. That day, before boarding the bus for Boston, I had loaded “Endless Fantasy,” the new album by the Brooklyn-based chiptune band Anamanaguchi, onto my iPod. The bus came at midnight, as scheduled. I settled into my seat, put “Endless Fantasy” on repeat, and listened to it the whole way home.

Chiptune is a genre of pop music that uses eight-bit sounds, sometimes from old video-game consoles, sometimes from synthesizers set to emulate those consoles, as the primary elements in the creation of new songs. I first got interested in chiptune about five years ago via “Pocket Monster,” an EP by a British act named Henry Homesweet. I listened to “Pocket Monster” a few times, not dismissively but glancingly, and set it aside. Last summer, for some reason I started to play it again, along with a Henry Homesweet LP called “Palm Trance.” Four years on, something about the music hooked me immediately. The songs burbled and bleeped like aliens desperately trying to get a message through. Some songs, like “Escape From IP1,” were swirling and insistent, the aural equivalent of spin art.

Henry Homesweet moved me backward through a range of chiptune artists. There were acts like She, the brainchild of the Swedish-based Polish producer Lain Trzaska, who creates moody Japanese-flavored pop, often with female vocals. There were bands like I Fight Dragons, a Chicago-based group that specializes in straightforward alternative rock with occasional chiptune accents: a five-piece with an eight-bit spine. There were artists who canted toward electronica, and others who canted toward acoustica, and others who canted toward industrial, and others who canted toward novelty.

And, finally, there was Anamanaguchi, whom I discovered last but who quickly claimed a share of the lead. Since 2006, the New York-based group has released a number of singles and EPs, along with one full-length album and the soundtrack to the video-game version of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”—not to be confused with the original graphic novel, or the film starring Michael Cera. The band’s Scott Pilgrim game soundtrack was filled with brief, pyrotechnic pop songs overstuffed with hooks. Anamanaguchi seemed connected not only to chiptune but to the tradition of high-energy pop bands like Pizzicato Five and Go! Team: sugar-rush music.

About a month after I returned to chiptune, I read that Anamanaguchi was scheduled to release a new LP in 2013. And then, a little while after that, I read that the band was finishing that album, “Endless Fantasy,” with help from a fifty-thousand-dollar Kickstarter campaign. Donors were promised everything from special V.I.P. credentials on tour to lessons in chiptune creation; the top pledge level, of ten thousand dollars, which went unclaimed, was attached to a prize that included the band driving its van to a fan’s house, playing a show, and then leaving the van behind.

In the past, Anamanaguchi has worked at sprint speeds. Most of its Scott Pilgrim tracks clock in at under two minutes, and to call them brisk is an understatement: the song “Party Stronger” moves almost like a rag in places, like Super Mario collaborated with Scott Joplin. “Endless Fantasy” is more subdued, or at least more considered: the songs are longer, with most over three minutes, and the title track running almost to six. “Viridian Genesis” has a gentle ambient foundation, and “Prom Night” builds slowly but surely. None of this means that the band can’t jump out like a jack-in-the-box (“John Hughes” is a perfectly titled anthem that recalls various aspects of New Wave, and “In the Basement” is so sunny and open that its title seems like a mistake, or a joke), only that jumping is now one strategy among many.

Critics—and by critics, I mean people who have listened to the music when I have played it for them and wrinkled their noses in disapproval—say there’s no human element in chiptune. It’s not true. The title track of Henry Homesweet’s “Palm Trance” has a melody line that sounds like aimless morning humming, and what’s more human than that? And “Disaster Hearts,” by I Fight Dragons, is a straightforward ballad that uses eight-bit only sparingly. In some cases, those organic touches can also expose the electronics as artificial. But, for a band as brightly colored as Anamanaguchi, it’s the absence of audible humanity that makes them appear genuinely human. The band’s music seems less like a reflection of inner states than actions taken in response to those inner states. Because the sounds it uses are based in video games, the music plays off themes of competition, fun, risk, and reward. All these themes are present in the video for “Meow,” the first single from “Endless Fantasy.”

People can carp about the current pop landscape, but it would be churlish to complain about music as inventive, energetic, confident, and good-humored as this. In the closing track of “Endless Fantasy,” an alternately ebullient and moody song called “(T-T)b,” the band sets forth, in unadorned spoken vocals, a philosophy that seems at once starry-eyed and plausible: “Your natural state is enlightenment. Everything else you’ve ever been told about yourself is a lie. We are trying to wake ourselves up because we come from source energy and we are all one.” Maybe that’s what the older woman in the bus station was trying to explain.