In the Rebel Alliance to resurrect Real Rock’n’Roll, Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos viewed himself as Luke Skywalker. How else are we meant to interpret one particular live version of the band’s 2007 single “Pump Up the Volume,” which opens with John Williams’ Star Wars title theme before the horns crash into the song’s swaggering first notes?

When Art Brut first met in 2002, at a party hosted by short-lived London indie darlings Ciccone, NME’s number-one ranked album was Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. The early aughts post-punk revival was bursting at the seams (Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights came out the same year), but the pop charts could barely manage a distortion pedal. British music media was similarly fractured—BBC’s Top of the Pops was sprinting towards its swan song, while NME and Kerrang! struggled to adapt to the velocity of new online-only publications. Armed with Argos’, well, brute sprechgesang and wielding their guitars like battle axes, Art Brut painted themselves as the saviors of a dying scene. On two new compilations titled after lyrics, the 2xLP A Record Collection, Reduced to a Mixtape and the 5xCD box set And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice!, Art Brut assemble their studio recordings, B-sides, and a handful of electrifying live cuts that argue that the scene, in turn, saved them.

In the nearly 20 years since the band’s debut, 2005’s Bang Bang Rock & Roll, it seems painfully clear that Argos has failed to write “the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along,” or to pen the next “Happy Birthday,” as he declared on “Formed a Band.” But Art Brut’s influence on contemporary indie rock has only grown since their last album, 2018’s Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!. The echo of Argos’ cocksure yet self-aware monotone can be heard in Joe Casey’s tortured soliloquies for Protomartyr, the deadpan nonsequiturs of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, or the fever-pitch rants of Idles’ Joe Talbot. And while the band’s lyrical themes—falling in love with girls, starting a band to make out with girls, loving music more than making out—appear provincial compared to their politically minded disciples, Argos’ contemptuous streak has resurfaced in a recent crop of British bands like Yard Act and Squid. These newer groups might couch their music in the alienation of late capitalism, but fundamentally, they’re asking the same question that Argos barked back in 2005: “Why don’t our parents worry about us?”

This isn’t the first time Art Brut have revisited their past. In 2013, they released a “best of” collection, Top of the Pops, named after both the band’s 2004 song and the show on which they’d never have the chance to perform. For the casual Art Brut fan, there isn’t much added value on these new releases. The first few songs on both the LP and CD sets mirror the Top of the Pops tracklist almost exactly, opening with “Formed a Band,” “My Little Brother,” and “Emily Kane.” Instead, this collection is both an introduction for potential new fans who were still in primary school during the band’s peak, and on the other end, an overdue celebration for Art Brut obsessives, who will doubtlessly appreciate the frenetic live recordings included here. At the time of its release, Argos used Top of the Pops to prematurely anoint Art Brut a “CLASSIC ROCK BAND” (they had been on the front cover of German Rolling Stone, after all), and projected that their “Next phase is HERITAGE ROCK BAND. See you in 10 years for a Second Volume.” It took a little longer, but Art Brut have returned to cement their status: being a Heritage Rock Band usually requires leaving some sort of lasting physical legacy.

For Argos’ teeth-gnashing musical protagonist, discovering rock’n’roll was the first step in a futile quest—electric guitars evoked a world of declining relevance and unfulfilled potential. But it was hard to tell how much of the band was an act. Was their bassist’s name really Freddy Feedback? What about first guitarist Chris Chinchilla? How serious was Argos when he sang “popular culture no longer applies to me,” and how much was a deflection from his own insecurities as a songwriter? These box sets suggest that both can be true: Art Brut sound at the peak of their powers performing live, darting frantically across the fretboard and drumkit at the French festival Eurockéennes in 2006. At that show’s rendition of “Bad Weekend,” Argos justified his anger as he begged his audience to write books and make films: “You can’t complain about it unless you’re doing something about it!” Without the band behind him, he seemed to say, he’d be just another guy whining about art after one too many lagers.

The outlandish confidence of Art Brut’s debut, which seemed to demand critical success by sheer force of will, wasn’t born in a vacuum. On these box sets, we hear Argos’ journey to overcompensatory arrogance: On an early version of “Formed a Band,” one of several “Brutleg” demo tapes, he sounds almost bashful as he dryly explains, “And yes, this is my singing voice—it’s not irony, it’s not rock and roll.” All the pieces are there on the first take of “Modern Art”—guitars that build like a structure fire, wild screams that echo behind Argos as he screams, “Modern art makes me want to rock OUT!”—but he hadn’t quite mastered the authoritarian sneer he wields on the final version. The demos, though skippable for the average post-punk fan, are both humbling and humanizing, a crack in the assertive facade the band projected onto its albums and live shows.

When Argos sang “We make pop music,” on a song by the same name, he wasn’t describing the sound of the mainstream charts. He meant pop as in “popular,” and he wanted Art Brut to be the biggest band on Earth. These proclamations feel misaligned to the current pop landscape, where cult-like fanbases persist in the absence of actual hits (and even a smash doesn’t guarantee loyal customers). Art Brut came to life in an ecosystem that felt, comparatively, diverse: more blogs, more labels, more DIY venues—more access to music than ever before. It only makes Art Brut’s trajectory feel more tragic, their later albums supplanting delusions of grandeur with petty scene squabbles (“He dresses like he came free with the NME,” he sneered on 2011’s “Bad Comedian”) hidden behind a veil of sarcasm. These reissues recall a recent past that felt more meritocratic, where one glowing blog post or energetic late-night TV performance could break a band. In our tangled post-streaming landscape, Art Brut’s dogged belief in their own greatness seems like a balm against entrenched pop hierarchies. “No more songs about sex and drugs and rock and roll, it’s boring,” Argos sang on the debut album’s title track. If only he’d known how much worse it could get.

Art Brut: And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice!

$41 at Rough Trade

$51 at Amazon