Kevin Bronson on March 28th, 2012

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The only thing missing at the Satellite on Saturday night was a huge banner that read “Welcome Class of 1996.”

Imperial Teen’s show behind their first album since 2007, “Feel the Sound,” felt like a class reunion where all the cool kids convened to revisit the old days and show off their new luxury automobiles, minus any of pettiness or backbiting that you might find around the punchbowl. There were wry jokes, impish smiles and knowing winks from the foursome of Roddy Bottum, Will Schwartz, Lynn Truell and Jone Stebbins, and, best of all, an hour-plus of the San Francisco-bred foursome’s bouncy, occasionally subversive indie-pop.

• ||| Photos by Carl Pocket

“What have I been doing for the past five years?” Stebbins said in mock seriousness. “Getting stoned.”

Trading vocals and instruments like teenagers swap spit, Imperial Teen brought an indie-rock ferocity to songs new and old, crunching through “Ivanka” early and saving “Butch” for next to last, when, unfortunately, some of the parental types had already exited the packed room. Still, it was as robust an outing as longtime fans could hope for from a band that roared in the ’90s and only occasionally flexed its songwriting muscles since.

And right down to the final song, the catchy new single “Runaway,” there was plenty of good humor. “I miss having stalkers,” Schwartz said with an an elfin grin (although his recent side project Psychic Friend should have earned him a few). Deadpanned Stebbins: “You could take out an ad.”

Portland’s Radiation City played the lead-in set and failed to muster anything indelible, but not so for the local openers, the Breakups. The underrated power-pop quintet, who just released their album “Running Jumping Falling Shouting,” was at its tightest, dispensing hooky, three-minute earworms that recall the days of the Rentals and early Fountains of Wayne, and the pop architects who drew up those blueprints.