Imperial Teen Return With All Over You

Three decades after Seasick, the quartet’s new album keeps the same garage-pop instincts, even as the terms that once made the band a provocation have quietly changed.

Thirty years separate Seasick from All Over You, and not much separates the instincts. The new album, out on Merge, the label that has handled Imperial Teen’s records since 2002 and replaced Slash, opens with “Overdrive,” a come-on passed between guitarist and keyboardist Will Schwartz on the verses and bassist Jone Stebbins on the chorus. The band’s mode is garage pop with an unabashed sexual charge. It has outlived most of what once made it look like a provocation.

The personnel history explains some of that persistence. Roddy Bottum was already known from Faith No More when the group formed; drummer Lynn Truell came from the San Francisco proto-grunge outfit Sister Double Happiness. In 1996, a band with two openly gay men and two women read as subversive. It reads as a lineup now. The four