Back together, but never broken up

It is without a trace of nostalgia that Bill Janovitz notes how the passing years have thinned the hair, added lines to faces, changed relationships and rearranged priorities. “All of that hopefully becomes the stuff of songwriting,” the Buffalo Tom singer-guitarist says. “You still want to tap into the same interpersonal and emotional places.”

With the release this month of “Three Easy Pieces,” its first album in nine years, the Boston trio -- whose bristling, exuberant guitar pop made them alt-rock favorites in the early- and mid-1990s -- find those places, some 18 years after issuing the first of their six albums.

Janovitz and bandmates Chris Colbourn and Tom Maginnis never broke up after 1998’s “Smitten,” but fatherhood and their professional lives relegated Buffalo Tom to the back burner, except for occasional hometown shows. Old anthems such as “Taillights Fade” and “Soda Jerk” gave those college-rock fans a buzz, but the trio discovered during “very organic” recording sessions that they still had more music in them.

“It was a very emotionally daunting prospect to get together again, now that we’re fathers and working jobs,” he says. “But we’re better at weeding out what’s truly important. I guess that’s called growth.”

The new album, sonically the kin of 1992’s “Let Me Come Over” and ‘93’s “Big Red Letter Day,” certainly rings with a familiar quality -- as Janovitz says, “that bittersweet/melancholy thing we’re known for.”

“We’re better at distilling what we want to say,” he says. “Before there was always that opaque Buffalo Tom imagery. Now I think the focus has gotten a lot sharper.”

Buffalo Tom, with Juliana Hatfield, the El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. 8 tonight. $19. (323) 936-6400, www.theelrey.com