The difference between an artist staying the same and never changing is miniscule but worth noticing. Artists who stay the same can carve an entire career out of working through their organizing ideas (see: Sonic Youth), whereas artists who never change typically sound retro from the start (see: third-wave ska bands). New albums from Brooklyn’s Oxford Collapse and Omaha’s Conor Oberst offer two studies of this process in action.

“Bits” (Sub Pop), Oxford Collapse’s fourth album, which comes out today, finds the trio sticking with its flexibly ramshackle, familiarly pleasurable indie rock. And like many other bands — Wolf Parade, Islands, Brooklyn’s own Crystal Stilts, and Vivian Girls — Oxford Collapse’s version of indie rock adheres to an idea rather than a marketable sound. It’s an attitude that the band immediately confesses: “Bits” opens with the sound of a car engine turning over, an unmistakable allusion to the opening noise from the Minutemen’s 1984 benchmark of working-class American punk, “Double Nickels on the Dime.”

Oxford Collapse aims for the Minutemen’s spirit, if not its sound — the Brooklyn trio better recalls the peppy chaos of bands such as Ohio’s Gaunt and Northern Virginia’s wonderfully opaque Wingtip Sloat. But that introductory tip of the cap calibrates the breadth of ideas to follow. Whether its big-hook pop, noisy rock, or pretty almost-folk, Oxford Collapse is a band unencumbered by fashionable genre.

Guitarist-vocalist Michael Pace, drummer Dan Fetherston, and bassist-vocalist Adam Rizer gamely navigate those ups and downs. “Bits” is unpolished, but it’s not buried beneath the surface hiss of mannered lo-fidelity recording. It’s a warts-and-all album as proud of its rougher moments (such as the clumsy country-rock of “Featherbeds”) as it is of its adrenaline-pushing bullseyes (“The Birthday Wars”).

In fact, the album’s first four tracks capture the band’s blithe range. Opener “Electric Arc” is a chugging guitar-rock number that clips along at an agitated pace and flowers into an ecstatic chorus with Messrs. Pace and Rizer’s pop-punk harmonies. The band switches gears with “The Birthday Wars,” which is built from an anxious bass line that wrestles with Mr. Fetherston’s drums and Mr. Pace’s sunburst guitar noise. It’s a lovely racket, and the song somehow ends up feeling like shoegaze pop. “Vernon-Jackson” spotlights the band’s mellower side, with a fairly tepid piece of jangling, paisley rock.

And then comes the album’s highlight, “Young Love Delivers,” the sort of ironic rock that perfectly entangles music, lyrics, and attitude. An almost classically snotty punk song — complete with stumbling bass line and sung-spoken lyrics — “Young Love Delivers” obliquely charts a relationship from the giddy immaturity of youth to the disappointing bitterness of middle age in deadpan sarcasm. The song rises to the sort of anthem-like chorus that typically communicates some kind of ego-inflating cliché, only Oxford Collapse screams two lines so drenched in spite — “You’re so sweet, thanks for asking / We’re doing fine for our steady slow decline” — it subverts the music’s triumphant noise. Adding insult to such injury, the band inserts a bridge that sounds lifted from some piece of romantic bubble-gum pop right before the final, knife-twisting verse, making “Young Love Delivers” a wonderful jolt of intoxicating cynicism.

“Bits” never quite equals that track’s ingenious mirth (although “John Blood” comes close), but it’s so consistently all-over-the map that it never really matters. The trio hasn’t quite refined or expanded the approach it displayed on 2006’s “Remember the Night Parties” and 2005’s “A Good Ground.” Instead, it has embraced an anti-careerist streak, less interested in traditional pop success than in becoming a steady working band that cranks out tunes for its modest fan base.

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“Conor Oberst” (Merge), the self-titled debut of Mr. Oberst’s most recent group, the Mystic Valley Band, finds the young singer-songwriter continuing his exploration of the folk, country, and rock of traditional Americana. The album’s 12 tracks are perfectly winsome examples of what the 28-year-old Mr. Oberst has been doing since the early 1990s — and that may be the album’s biggest problem.

Not that “Conor Oberst” won’t satisfy its core fans. Although not released under Mr. Oberst’s Bright Eyes moniker, and not produced by his longtime collaborator Mike Mogis, “Conor Oberst” captures the sort of intimate, introspective folk rock in which Bright Eyes has traded for the past decade. The main difference is the absence of Mr. Oberst’s autobiographical lyrics; “Conor Oberst” instead sounds more like a road album filled with shiftless drifters and other travelers. Recorded in January and February in Mexico, the album is exactly what fans have come to expect from Mr. Oberst, and nothing more.

The album favors slower-tempo numbers that feel ready-made for drinking sing-alongs, from the stately “Danny Callahan” to the jaunty, windswept “Sausalito.” Predictably better are the intensely stark moments, such as “Leaders in the Temple,” featuring Mr. Oberst alone with a guitar, or “Eagle on a Pole” a threadbare song on which sparse drums and backing vocals arrive to add emotional oomph.

Mr. Oberst fares less well when he picks up the tempo. “Get-Well-Cards” is Mr. Oberst trying to write a Bob Dylan song outright, down to the rambling, tongue-tying lyrics and a keening, nasal delivery. A little better is “I Don’t Want to Die (in a Hospital),” Mr. Oberst’s fairly successful stab at writing a carousing, piano-driven country rock ode in the tradition of the Band. Best, though, is the romantic stomper “Moab,” a song about finding peace while staying constantly in motion.

It’s a lesson Mr. Oberst hasn’t quite learned himself. In the mid- and late-’90s, he fascinated fans and critics alike with his precocious talent, a teenage and 20-something songwriter who wrote songs of personal depth and emotional poignancy. He wowed as any child prodigy does, but now, almost 30, he hasn’t really changed much as an artist. Admittedly, there is something to be said for delivering the same kind of product so consistently over the years. But Mr. Oberst is treading dangerously close to becoming little more than a name-brand franchise, not that different from Starbucks.

Oxford Collapse performs in Brooklyn on August 17 and August 21 (oxfordcollapse.com) and Conor Oberst performs at the Bowery Ballroom (boweryballroom.com) on August 12.