Three solid new releases from two beloved indie outfits and a local punk troubadour hit stores today. The London duo the Kills marry their stripped-down rock to modest pop hooks for “Midnight Boom,” and the New York anti-folk singer-songwriter Adam Green finds his inner orchestral romantic on “Sixes and Sevens.” But it’s the snarling, ribald “Get Awkward,” from the Nashville punk quartet Be Your Own Pet, that packs the most consistent punch.

On the Kills’s first two albums, the American vocalist Alison Mosshart and British guitarist Jamie Hince mined the bluesy, dangerous underbelly of 1960s and 1970s rock ‘n’ roll excess that Royal Trux favored during the 1990s. But with their latest album, “Midnight Boom,” Ms. Mosshart and Mr. Hince expand their rhythmic palette and one-trick subject matter into a well-crafted, nuanced affair.

The Kills don’t blunt the slinky, slightly sinister sexiness of their music by inching toward a more accessible sound. The duo’s backing electronic drum patterns and textures have slowed a bit this time around, and the more varied, down-tempo paces provide a richer backdrop for Ms. Mosshart’s reflective, pinched vocals. “Time ain’t going to cure you, honey,” she laments over the clicking percussion loop of “Tape Song,” and the sentiment feels like a recent epiphany. Mr. Hince’s guitar parts punch through the song’s simple beat like a reminder of rowdier days, but the tune never explodes into a hackneyed release of rock catharsis; instead, it lurches and lumbers along in fits and starts, riding a knife-edge tension between Ms. Mosshart’s weathered vocal delivery and Mr. Hince’s anxious guitar thrusts.

It’s a tension that defines the best tracks here. “I’m bored with cheap and cheerful / I want expensive sadness,” Ms. Mosshart announces on the album’s standout track, “Cheap and Cheerful.” The backing rhythm is a jittery smear of a bass line, over which Mr. Hince drops an arrested guitar part that hovers in the instrument’s lower register. Throughout the unhurriedly roiling song, neither the lyrics nor the riff is allowed to release its pent-up energy. “I want you to be crazy because you’re boring, baby, when you’re safe,” Ms. Mosshart confesses during the bridge, but “Cheap and Cheerful” is all the more affecting because it never gives in to unleashing the typical anthemic rock nonsense.

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Adam Green also tries something new for his fifth solo album, “Sixes and Sevens.” Mr. Green, who, with Kimya Dawson, was one half of the Moldy Peaches, has seen the duo enjoy a recent resurgence thanks to the group’s song “Anyone Else But You,” which was featured in the Oscar-nominated indie hit “Juno.” Yet Mr. Green doesn’t sound ready to bring the duo out of hiatus on his new album. He packs 20 songs into 48 minutes and moves from Hawaiian pop (“Island Song”) to lavish downer pop (“Cannot Get Sicker”) and ’70s-inspired after-party soundtracks (“Twee Twee Dee”). “Sixes and Sevens” is yet another dispatch from Mr. Green’s omnivorous pop brain, but he favors such bucolically baroque arrangements and ideas here that it sounds as if he turned in his usual Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed influences to try on Bryan Ferry for a spell.

A cavalcade of horns and background singers introduces the album opener, “Festival Song,” one of Mr. Green’s sunny tracks about compacted feelings. “I don’t really have to live, to doubt is to give,” he sings in his rich baritone, as if about the happiest subject on Earth, until he comes to: “Now for you to touch me, to reach out and cut me / just like my mother said, you’d stand in my way.”

Mr. Green has a gift for just such drastic lyrical shifts, capable of subverting and twisting songs into surprising and comical contortions with absurd turns of phrase. Mr. Green’s lyrics on “Island Song” hint at Jimmy Buffett pop when he sings, “Feel the sea breeze waiting to lay you down just like a diamond.” Still, he quickly takes the song into terrain far more characteristic of his own catalog when he speeds through “ring ding battering ram / who’ll dissect the battle plan / he who sells us Percodan one day.” It’s a silly moment, but Mr. Green’s gift is to make the silly feel like more than a mere joke. On “Sixes and Sevens” he’s aided in that endeavor by his fondness for big, plush songs that lend his wily songwriting a delicious sense of Las Vegas showbiz glitz and artifice.

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Artifice, however, is everything Be Your Own Pet rails against. The group’s self-awareness is what makes its face-slapping pop-punk such a huge treat. Like its self-titled 2006 debut, the band’s sophomore release, “Get Awkward,” is inescapably an album made by and about young people. Lead vocalist Jemina Pearl, with her cat-on-fire caterwaul, sings about soft drinks, bellyaches, sex, boredom, and fleeting thoughts of death, pushing “Get Awkward” into the sublime as she goes.

Behind Ms. Pearl’s vocals, the band — drummer John Eatherly, guitarist Jonas Stein, and bassist Nathan Vasquez — lays down rippling, go-for-broke punk spiked with abrupt stops, starts, and changes. It helps that Be Your Own Pet is supremely adept at capturing the snotty, manic energy of early-1980s American punk without sounding derivative.

The band also avoids the lockstep misogyny that pulled anything-goes punk into the domain of shirtless, testosterone-laden American hard-core. That, clearly, is part of the indispensable nature of Ms. Pearl’s firecracker presence. Her brash sense of humor and her sarcastic, girlish take on punk tropes make for wonderful songs. She also has the best scream since Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna. “Becky” is about a falling-out between former best friends: “You signed my yearbook and that was pretty rad,” Ms. Pearl sighs, before admitting, “but I’m getting sick of you and it’s just too bad.” By this point, the seemingly boilerplate story has puffed up into an us-vs.-them punk tribalism, in which Ms. Pearl promises, “What does it matter anyway, ’cause I’ve got a brand new friend, okay?”

Yes, somehow Be Your Own Pet fuses two clichés to yield something fun, immediate, and irresistible, and it’s the sort of alchemy the group pulls off through the album’s 14 songs. “Get Awkward” isn’t as blithely teenage-nihilistic as the band’s debut, but what it lacks in flagrant rude gestures it makes up for in technical ability: The band is simply better at making its racket this time around.