If there’s one thing Redd Kross are famous for, it’s having famous fans. Years before Sonic Youth made Madonna their own, brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald were showing Kim and Thurston how pop culture pin-ups could be reframed as punk iconography. They got Sofia Coppola to pose nude on an album cover and inspired her brother Roman to essentially build a feature film around their kitschy ’70s style. They illuminated the path for Stone Temple Pilots to move beyond mosh-pit machismo toward glammy swagger. They reissued their ’90s catalog through Jack White’s Third Man imprint. And Jeff married a Go-Go. There is, however, one notable alt-rock star who resisted Redd Kross’ charm offensive.

You’d think Redd Kross would’ve been right up Kurt Cobain’s alley: Both he and the McDonalds came of age with record collections where the Beatles were filed next to Black Flag, and both were charter members of the American Shonen Knife fan club. But according to mutual friend Dale Crover (the one guy who’s drummed for both Nirvana and Redd Kross), an unimpressed Cobain walked away from a 1987 Redd Kross gig in Tacoma complaining that the McDonalds seemed “too happy.” After seeing Crover tell that story in an early cut of director Andrew Reich’s new Redd Kross documentary, Born Innocent, Steve McDonald wrote “Way Too Happy,” a bittersweet power-pop number that appears deep into Redd Kross’ new self-titled double album. “What did he mean?” Steve asks with audibly wounded pride, before responding with an uncannily Cobain-esque sneer, as if he were still being taunted from beyond the grave. But the McDonalds aren’t looking to reheat old beef—rather, “Way Too Happy” serves as a renewed mission statement for a band that has always embraced joy as its superpower.

As indie rock’s original poptimists, Redd Kross elevated fandom to an artform, imagining a world where ABBA and the Partridge Family could be placed on equal footing with Germs and the Stooges. But after decades of plundering rock’n’roll’s past like a thrift-store discount rack, Redd Kross are now fixing their retro-gazing lens on themselves. Redd Kross is part of a 45th-anniversary celebration campaign that includes Reich’s documentary and an upcoming memoir (Now You’re One of Us), and it’s a self-reflexive exercise in every way, from the cover art (a ruby-tinged makeover of the Beatles’ White Album, the first record Jeff bought as a kid) to the uncharacteristically wistful, introspective songwriting. But seeing as Redd Kross are the rare band who can celebrate 45 years in showbiz while one founding member is still in their 50s, the eternally youthful McDonalds are still committed to chasing new glories. They may no longer resemble the androgynous provocateurs of old, but their pop savvy remains.

Redd Kross provides a thorough immersion in the McDonalds’ multi-dimensional sound world, giving equal airtime to sleazy rockers (“Stunt Queen”), glamtastic power ballads (“The Witches Stand”), and jaunty pop numbers that sound like the theme song to some saucy late-’60s British sex farce (“The Shaman’s Disappearing Robe”). While the White Album framework may suggest an anarchic, free-ranging pastiche, Redd Kross aren’t radically reinventing themselves here: Listening to the record feels more like rifling through a cherished collection of classic 45s. Recorded in collaboration with ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer (who produces and plays drums for a recuperating Crover here), Redd Kross is a hit parade that perpetually walks the tightrope between the McDonalds’ pristine melodic craft and their innate garage-band insolence.

Even when limiting themselves to pop-single proportions, Redd Kross can traverse entire universes. A rare duet between the brothers, “The Main Attraction,” begins as an existential acoustic lament before hotwiring their voices together and using their natural harmonic power to launch the song into space. If Redd Kross are the definition of a cult act, then “Good Times Propaganda Band” is their indoctrination theme, a tiki-lounge psych-pop excursion that suddenly drifts into KISS pyrotechnics. And in just over two minutes, the softcore porn-inspired “Emanuelle Insane” uses a backward loop of Redd Kross’ 1981 circle-pit standard “Annette’s Got the Hits” to forge an unholy alliance between groovy ’60s sitar-psych and brooding ’80s post-punk.

But Redd Kross is ultimately a testament to what one song refers to as the “Simple Magic”: “Three sacred chords,” Jeff sings, “Their power shouldn’t be ignored!” And so the McDonalds spend the bulk of Redd Kross kicking out the jangly jams with the effortless expediency of the Beatles if they cut their teeth in the late-’70s L.A. hardcore scene. (AI technology will do no better job of recreating the voice of John Lennon than Jeff McDonald does on the rousing “What’s In It for You?”) But Redd Kross spikes the McDonalds’ well-worn cheeky attitude with a healthy dose of sincere gratitude, particularly on the album’s closing autobiographical anthem “Born Innocent.” An origin-story myth set to windmilling Pete Townshend riffs, the song suggests that if the brothers aren’t satisfied with the documentary and memoir, they already have the anchor track for a Redd Kross jukebox musical.

“Born Innocent” is, of course, named after Redd Kross’ 1982 debut, an ironically titled document of corrupted youth that opened with a song about a former child star busted for cocaine possession. As the Born Innocent documentary illustrates, the McDonalds have endured a lot of crazy shit that could irreparably break less sanguine spirits, from a 13-year-old Steve being abducted by a woman nearly twice his age, to Jeff’s substance abuse in the ’80s, to their band’s chronic commercial misfortune. But on Redd Kross, the McDonalds are still very much those Hawthorne kids getting their minds blown with each flip on the turntable, forever gazing at the Paul McCartney and Paul Stanley posters in their bedrooms and dreaming of one day hanging alongside them. “We are all born innocent,” the McDonalds declare in unison, and after nearly a half-century of making music together, they’ve magically managed to stay that way.