If they’d been born a generation earlier, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley — the husband-and-wife core who founded Yo La Tengo in 1984 — might have worked in the Brill Building and earned a nice living writing hits for people who can actually sing. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and instead they ended up composing their own great American songbook — a 14-album catalog (less compilations, EPs, etc.) that for all its stylistic wanderings has maintained a remarkable standard of quality control.

The trio (James McNew is the third) devoted more than half its 21-song set at a sold-out 9:30 Club Thursday night to tunes from the last three years. They played eight from the just-released Popular Songs, its title a joke in the tradition of Big Star’s #1 Record. It’s another seductive, eminently listenable, probably-not-wholly-necessary album of impeccably crafted fuzz pop.