United behind an imminent new album on Yep Roc Records entitled “Take a Good Look” and recently chronicled in author Joe Bonomo’s “Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band,” New York City’s own Fleshtones are currently at the height of their powers. As Mr. Bonomo does well to explain, the band can look back at some 25 years of personal misadventure, professional stick-to-it-ness, and musical excellence, all in an age when most other groups of the Fleshtones’ vintage have long since hung it up or “reinvented” themselves into inadvertent self-parody.

A recent show in Brooklyn during the three-day “Cave Stomp” garage-band convergence saw the group command the mammoth venue’s ballroom stage with an aggressive exuberance only equaled by Boston’s Lyres, and an expertise only bested by Tacoma, Wash.’s legendary protopunk show band the Sonics. Lean, wild, funny, and directly cabled into primal three-chord war chants and loud ‘n’ smooth red-eyed soul at its most volcanic, the Fleshtones wiped up Warsaw’s wood laminate floor with the rest of Cave Stomp’s bill of over-the-hill ’60s rock fossils and up-and-coming young pseudo mop-tops. “The amazing thing,” REM guitarist Peter Buck says about the Fleshtones (frontman, harmonica player, and organist Peter Zaremba, guitarist Keith Streng, drummer Bill Milhizer, and bass player Ken Fox) in “Sweat,” “is that every night for the last 30 years, they have consistently been the best live band on earth.”

“Alcohol use has never been an impediment to enjoying and understanding the art of the Fleshtones,” Mr. Zaremba said recently. “I like to hearken back to the innocence and spirituality of the old beer run and a house party when the parents are away. There’s still a bit of that in us.”

Fitting, then, that the self-styled purveyors of “Super Rock” will headline at hometown Brooklyn bar Magnetic Field on that most potentially alcohol-drenched of holiday celebrations, New Year’s Eve. “It’s a tough night,” Mr. Zaremba said of the date dreaded by the jaded as “amateur night.” But the band that has consistently brought a New Year’s Eve level of abandon to every one of its shows, regardless of the month, is up to the challenge.

Like fellow Queens-nurtured students of music’s past, the Ramones, the Fleshtones straddle the intersection between sincerity, bombast, and put-on with unusual dexterity and absolute lack of irony. “It’s a little bit like pro wrestling,” Mr. Zaremba said. “People say, ‘Oh, well wrestling is fake! That’s totally fake!’ I always say, ‘You get in there with one of those guys and see how fake it is.'” What premeditation goes into the Fleshtones’ signature moves — including drum-led parade entrances, Messrs. Streng and Fox’s PA speaker-climbs and bar-top guitar solos, and Mr. Zaremba’s ad-libbed mic-stand gyrations — the singer describes as “sort of a moral blueprint,” not a cut-and-dried script. During both a Fleshtones show and a steel cage match, Mr. Zaremba said, “You know that certain things happen for certain reasons, but fake, I don’t know …” As anyone who witnessed a Fleshtones show during the group’s ’80s ascent (and especially since Mr. Fox cemented the act when he joined in 1990) can tell you, there’s nothing fake about the wattage the group exudes in performance.

“In all these years you would think that we’d graduated to some level of hackdom just to make the job easier for ourselves,” Mr. Zaremba said. “‘Okay, here’s the part where I get on my knees and pretend to play the guitar with my teeth,’ or something. There is a certain amount of spontaneity involved. That has made it easier for us to stay together.”

During the late ’70s buzzword-heavy era of “new wave,” “no wave,” and seemingly every combination of the word “punk” and a hyphen, the Fleshtones declared themselves alone to be the pied pipers of “Super Rock.” The term, Mr. Zaremba said, encompasses “everything that we’ve liked about everything that we’ve heard wrapped up in one big greasy ball. Sometimes musicians and fans miss the point about what activates certain songs. We think we have a knack and we care enough to try to extract that. It doesn’t matter what song it is or where it’s from, if it does it, if it has it, we’re going to use it and add it to something else. We’ll take it from wherever it comes.”

The Fleshtones’ fair-game musical gestalt has led them to pepper their sets of original tunes with enough covers to yield a lengthy appendix in “Sweat” detailing the dozens of artists and titles that have received the Super Rock treatment over the years. “Highly incomplete,” Mr. Zaremba said of the six-and-a-half-page list. “I could come up with maybe five more pages. Unlike some bands that happen upon a cover song and it becomes a signature for them, we tend to get tired of them.”

Another pitfall the band has scrupulously avoided — even in the identity-challenged ’80s, a decade that saw artists from Neil Young to the Village People desperately attempt to stay au courant via synth-pop albums and other questionable forays into unknown musical territory — was losing sight of its strengths.

“I wouldn’t say that we didn’t want to tamper with a winning formula, because that’s clearly not the case,” Mr. Zaremba said ruefully. Indeed, in “Sweat” the singer sums up the band’s uncompromising constancy regardless of mainstream exposure, high-profile producers, and major-label record deals with this declaration: “The Fleshtones stared fame in the face and laughed.”

Rather, the band’s immunity to all manner of trends was simply a good fit. “It’s comfortable because it is who we are,” the singer said. “That’s us onstage. What, are we going to go through some New Romantic period or something? We’re lucky that we haven’t done anything like that.”

When it comes to the past, the Fleshtones have the luxury of letting their music do the talking. “We have less to explain than a lot of other people operative at that time,” Mr. Zaremba said. “Much less.”