The Jesus Lizard, “Rack.”

There are those for whom rock and roll is a transformative experience, people who are remade in the crucible of overdriven guitars and pummeling drumming. As someone who’s been through it, I can tell you that my baptism, my immersion into the vocal fry, guitar feedback and world-annihilating ennui of noise rock, was one of the most freeing  experiences of my life. The music’s majestic rage relieved me of much of my own repressed anger. And no band provided me more free therapy than The Jesus Lizard.

Between the mind-blowing intensity of the band’s legendary live shows and the blistering series of albums recorded with legendary engineer Steve Albini, the Chicago quartet earned its reputation as one of the most influential post-punk bands of the Nirvana era. The band’s momentum sagged a bit with the replacement of drummer Mac McNeilly with Jim Kimball on their last studio LP, Blue in 1998.

But for me, The Jesus Lizard opened my eyes to what a rock band could be. Like Led Zeppelin, the band was composed of four musicians with very different energies, from the virtuosic precision of guitarist Duane Denison to the rabid stage diving and nudity of vocalist David Yow, the sinister growl of David Wm Sims’ bass and the barely hinged percussive pummeling of McNeilly.

The Jesus Lizard is releasing its first album in more than a quarter of a century. Rack reestablishes it as the tightest punk band you’ve ever heard. It returns to its basic musical calculus. The band’s dramatic tension derives from the juxtaposition of laboratory-like musical precision with rabid, unhinged explosions of wry catharsis.

Songs like “Falling Down” recapture the intensity of the band’s earlier work. Over the pummeling power chords, Yow critiques the tendency toward conformity in the modern education system.

“The teachings of ages/ Those tutors were cruel/ They kept birdies in cages/ Called Einstein a tool/ He can rewrite the pages/ He can re-break all the rules/ This is now/ Falling down,” he screeches.

Even on slower songs, like lacerating blues song “Armistice Day” and the creepy monolog of “What If,” the intensity is undeniable, as if the band feels it still has something to prove—and then rises to the occasion. On “Alexis Feels Sick,” Denison’s single-note guitar minimalism and Yow’s manic caterwauling harken back to the band’s signature sound on “Here Comes Dudley,” from 1991 album Goat.

The clean guitar lines on the album’s closer, “Swan the Dog,” is strangely beautiful even as Sims’ stumbling bass line throbs up against it. “I wish I could/ Give birth to a dog/ And have it come out/ All trained/ And perfect/ I wish I could,” Yow sings.

The Jesus Lizard reunited with McNeilly in 2009 and the subsequent tours have demonstrated very little loss of intensity even as the band approach the age of AARP membership. But the new album leaves no doubt that one of the most incendiary post-punk bands of the 1990s has still got it. The idea that rock and roll is a young man’s game dates back to an epoch when adults would shuffle off gracefully toward the easy listening section soon after graduation. But in the current state of rock and roll, there are legions of tattooed gray and aging fans out there, who now have something new to listen to. Their kids will probably dig it, too.

An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of guitarist Duane Denison. We regret the error.