Weezer is one of the most curiously durable alternative rock bands to survive the 1990s and forge into the current decade. When the Southern California quartet released its self-titled debut in 1994 (the first of three self-titled albums), it sounded like an independent pop group that had been polished to major-label rock, full of precociously geeky arena hooks. That album and the band’s 1996 follow-up, “Pinkerton,” became surprising generational signposts, influencing a legion of emerging emo bands with their potent blend of outsider appeal and bright, catchy hooks. The secret weapon was (and remains) singer-songwriter Rivers Cuomo, whose lyrical mix of sincerity and self-deprecation was a refreshing breath of accessible humor in pop at a time when “alternative” was often dark and depressing.

Balancing the jokes with the genuine is what makes Weezer’s music so appealing, and despite a slight change in the recording process, it’s why the band’s new self-titled album (whose red cover will surely earn it the moniker “the Red Album”), the group’s sixth album (and its first in three years) continues its winning streak. Unlike on previous albums, Mr. Cuomo, who’s reputed to have written thousands of songs that will never see a record store, is not the principal songwriter and vocalist, sharing composing and singing duties with guitarist Brian Bell, bassist Scott Shriner, and drummer Pat Wilson. Back again is Rick Rubin, who produced the band’s 2005 record “Make Believe,” and once again he makes himself scarce for the most part, allowing the group to find its sound organically.

Lead single “Pork and Beans” finds Weezer doing what it does best, namely making a song about how being that proverbial square peg in a community full of round holes can feel like the greatest thing in the world. Over a jaunty guitar line and shaking drum pulse, the perpetually boyish Mr. Cuomo, who will turn 38 next week, sings about his receding hairline, his expanding waistline, losing his cool, and thinking about working with collaborator extraordinaire Timbaland, setting up a power-pop explosion of distorted guitars on the defiant chorus, “I don’t give a hoot about what you think.” At three minutes, it’s cheeky, near-perfect summer pop, reminiscent of the band’s previous “Beverly Hills” and “Island in the Sun.”

But pure pop isn’t an accident. On “Heart Songs,” Mr. Cuomo runs through all the artists who have influenced him, from Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens, and Joan Baez to Eddie Rabbitt, Bruce Springsteen, Grover Washington, and, eventually, Quiet Riot, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Nirvana. Musically, the song threads together a reflective acoustic guitar strum and a gentle drum cadence, pushing Mr. Cuomo’s lyrics to the fore, accented here and there by a backing harmony. It’s an unabashedly nostalgic song, one that in temperament recalls the Minutemen’s “History Lessons Part II,” a band genesis song whose name-dropped signposts are underground punk musicians and not mass radio and MTV hit makers. That Weezer cherishes the names of mainstream 1980s and early 1990s pop is telling, because it’s so integral to its common, everyday appeal: Weezer’s sense of humor is rooted in an appreciation and knowledge of pop, but from a self-aware ironic distance.

In the end, it’s the tongue-in-cheek asides on “Weezer” that provide the most entertaining moments, but also limit the band to dessert status rather than main course. The band skips through multiple styles on “The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn),” moving from folky stomp to rocking jam to vocal march inside the first two minutes, and featuring Mr. Cuomo doing his best Freddie Mercury by singing in a high falsetto. The rap-rock hybrid of “Everybody Get Dangerous” includes an allusion to the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy (For the Devil)” during its final coda. And the outright synth pop of “Thought I Knew” is sung by Mr. Bell.

“Weezer” isn’t a great album, but it is playfully fun and approachable, which is all the group has ever tried to be. It starts to feel a bit too sarcastic with each successive listen, but that’s easy to forgive in a band having this much fun making fun of pop clichés inside of big-hook pop.

* * *

Fleet Foxes aren’t joking on their remarkable self-titled Sub Pop debut. The obvious analog for this Seattle, Wash., quintet is “Sung Tongs”-era Animal Collective: pristine, jubilant, pastoral folk music. But where Animal Collective is more an actively and wandering recombinant group, its members mining genres to see what new product they can create from them, Fleet Foxes are more unmitigated folk musicians. There’s no “freak” before that folk to position the group within the resurgence of mystical, metaphysical folk music, à la Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and others. The Fleet Foxes album sounds as if it could have been recorded in the late 1960s — and sometimes it sounds like the late 1860s.

That’s not to imply that the album is old and fusty, but that the song forms explored by the band — multi-instrumentalist-singers Craig Curran, Robin Pecknold, Nicholas Peterson, Skyler Skjelset, and Casey Westcott — feel embedded in our DNA, as if they’ve been around as long as humans have been singing. It helps that almost every song on the album is built around multi-part harmonies, positioning the group’s voices as the music’s main drive and focus. Guitar and percussion enter here and there, but their presence seems designed to accent and follow the singing. And this group of five men have angelic voices when they decide to sing as one.

“Quiet Horses” is a perfect example of Fleet Foxes at its best. A quiet throb and meandering guitar part trace a skeletal melody through the song’s prologue, but once the voices arrive, the entire piece soars into the stratosphere. The lyrics are hard to decipher at times, but the unmistakable feeling of giddy euphoria would be communicated even if the band were singing in Hungarian. Everything swirls together to achieve a weightless lift.

“Fleet Foxes” offers this kind of alchemy 11 more times in less than 40 minutes. It’s a disarmingly intimate and magical album, feeling like a time capsule reminder of the power of music’s simplest pleasures — voice and melody — to transport and transcend.