“In this bar, the beer don’t work on me,” David Thomas croons to open Pere Ubu’s 15th album, “Why I Hate Women.” It’s one of many ruminative lines delivered by the introspective characters in his songs, but it’s also a nice metaphor for his career. Mr. Thomas and his band mates have spent almost 30 years in the bars and nightclubs of pop music, moving from underground legend to flirtations with major labels to relative obscurity.

Yet Pere Ubu, which performs tomorrow at the Knitting Factory, has never succumbed to the elixirs of fame and fortune. In a time when indie bands half as old ride greatest-hits tours to the bank, the group refuses to compromise its music or pander to audiences. On “Why I Hate Women,” Mr. Thomas continues to mine new nuggets from his band’s distinctive sound.

Take the album’s second track, “Babylonian Warehouses.” Built around a sliding bass line from Michele Temple and the punchy drumming of Steve Mehlman, the song starts as an unassuming ballad. But Keith Moliné’s searing guitar, Robert Wheeler’s whirring synth, and Mr. Thomas’s ghostly moans transform the track from melancholy elegy into the nightmarish vision of a protagonist unsure that what he sees is real. As in much of the band’s work, unpredictable touches push a simple tune into territory only this legendary group has visited.

Mr. Thomas assembled Pere Ubu in Cleveland in the late 1970s out of the ashes of short-lived punk band Rocket from the Tombs. Named after the notorious 1890s Alfred Jarry play “Ubu-Roi,” the group began with two albums,1978’s “The Modern Dance” and 1979’s “Dub Housing,” which remain influential classics today. Thrashing rock, off-kilter beats, arty lyrics, and experimental noise all circled around Mr. Thomas’s creaky voice, creating a sound he dubbed “avant-garage.” The mix of brainy songwriting and visceral playing made Pere Ubu the only band that could turn the phrase “Non-Alignment Pact” into a fist-pump-worthy anthem.

After an early ’80s hiatus, a rejuvenated Pere Ubu hit a new peak in 1988. The albums “Tenement Year” and “Cloudland” were sly pop updates on the group’s slanted sound, and a surreal video for “Waiting for Mary,”featuring a clean-cut Mr. Thomas slinking around a Dadaist apartment room, even garnered play on MTV. But the group’s aesthetic proved too challenging for the mainstream, and it spent the next decade jumping from label to label, releasing five stellar albums between 1991 and 2002.

Since then, Mr. Thomas, who currently lives in England, has split time between Pere Ubu and his other project, Two Pale Boys. Mr. Moliné is a mainstay of the latter group, and “Why I Hate Women” is the first album on which he serves as Pere Ubu’s guitarist. His playing lights up the record, burning the edges of each song. On “Flames Over Nebraska,” his clucky solo digs a divot in the tune’s pounding melody, while his escalating riffs at the end of “Stolen Cadillac” hurl that piece into outer space.

But as always, Mr. Thomas inhabits the center of “Why I Hate Women.”The title comes from his recent interest in Noir novelist Jim Thompson, intended as a potential name for a yet-unwritten Thompson novel — something one of his rugged characters might spit out in a moment of soul-searching. Yet Mr. Thomas’s lyrics sound less like a Noir novel than a horror movie, with characters who explore their fraught psyches like victims eluding predators in the dark.

On “Caroleen” (which sounds like a twisted update of “Non-Alignment Pact”), Mr. Thomas’s protagonist muses on a lover who “lights my fire”to such extremes that he actually fears her flames (“She kisses me and it rips my head off / Her name rhymes with gasoline / Her perfume, I think it’s turpentine”). In “Love Song,” a hero’s romantic obsessions transform him into a monster.”My eyes are growing tentacles for to grab you / My eyes are growing hand grenades for to have you,” Mr. Thomas wails.

On the album’s strangest song,”Synth Farm,” a character wanders into the furthest reaches of his own shell-shocked mind. Stumbling through a barren, moonlit field, he hallucinates “clouds of dust and dogs,””ghosts in the barn,” and “horns of corn … gory in the sun” over a growling bed of synth noise, finally protesting urgently, “I know a thing or two.”

That line is another apt summation of Mr. Thomas’s singular genius. Thirty years on, he and his cohorts are wise but nowhere near weary. They may not have it all figured out yet, but compared to the empty illiteracy of most pop music, Pere Ubu definitely knows a thing or two.

Tonight at the Knitting Factory (74 Leonard St., between Church and Lafayette streets, 212-219-3132).