New York City rock had its trendy moment in 2001-2, when the Strokes, the Rapture and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs seemed poised to take over the world. Instead, all they did was make good music. While other cities, like Montreal, have lately seized the spotlight, New York bands haven't exactly disappeared. Here are three doing what New York bands do best: warping rock along the lines of their own stubborn, peculiar impulses and waiting for the world to catch up.

'Separation Sunday'
The Hold Steady

The Hold Steady is a band from Brooklyn that looks back to move ahead on its second album, "Separation Sunday" (French Kiss). Craig Finn, the leader, came to New York from Minnesota, where he led a band called Lifter Puller that also included the Hold Steady's lead guitarist, Tad Kubler. Performing last week at the Bowery Ballroom, Mr. Finn described the Hold Steady as a bar band, and where Lifter Puller used to back him up with circling, insistent guitar vamps, the Hold Steady adds an old-fashioned classic-rock swagger, direct from the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello. The Hold Steady definitely knows how to mesh a pair of guitars and splash some keyboards on top.

Mr. Finn isn't a standard lead singer: he's more of a lead shouter. He talks more than he sings, telling stories in rhyme but not exactly rapping, though he does come up with good old-fashioned rock choruses. In that, he follows through on New York talk-rockers like Lou Reed and Patti Smith, not to mention another Minnesota émigré, Bob Dylan. The songs on "Separation Sunday" continue the tales of characters from the Hold Steady's 2004 debut album, "Almost Killed Me." They're people from a misspent Midwestern youth: drunks, druggies, lovers and a lot of suburban Catholic kids gone wrong. In songs with titles like "Crucifixion Cruise" and "How a Resurrection Really Feels," they're looking for redemption when they're not looking for thrills. These are songs full of offhand aphorisms, and they can grab you from the first line, like the one that starts "Multitude of Casualties": "She drove it like she stole it." Of course, Mr. Finn climbs right in for the ride.

'The Wedding'
Oneida

Since 1997 the prolific and protean Brooklyn band Oneida has been exploring rock as incantation and bombardment. It has drawn on the patterns, the blare and the perpetual motion of Minimalism, primordial metal, 1970's kraut-rock and organ-driven garage-rock. Its two most recent releases, the excellent late-2004 EP "Nice./Splittin' Peaches" (Ace Fu) and the new album, "The Wedding" (Jagjaguwar), still feature the motoric keyboard-and-drums workouts that make Oneida so exhilarating onstage. Now Oneida is dipping more deeply into the 1960's. Some songs on "The Wedding" add the chamber-pop refinement of a string section; others invoke the haunted, distortion-edged drones of the Velvet Underground, the feathery fingerpicking of Pearls Before Swine, and the measured reverb grandeur of early Pink Floyd. And where the music grows more pensive, so do the lyrics. Although Oneida still cherishes enigmas and portents of death, "The Wedding" also includes something like love songs, including "Know," a series of apologies carried by Philip Glass-like string arpeggios: "I'm sorry you told me I block out the sun." "The Wedding" has some misfires, but vulnerability makes a promising new territory for Oneida. As much as this band loves repetition, it's determined not to repeat itself.

'God's Money'
Gang Gang Dance

Gang Gang Dance's second album, "God's Money" (the Social Registry), starts with a woman's piping voice above clattering low-fi drums in what could almost be an ethnographic recording from some unknown locale. Gang Gang Dance is a groove band dissolving in a hallucinatory haze, or, as one lyric puts it, "tipping on the thunder of a paradigm." In the course of "God's Money," it deploys a global assortment of instruments, using what sound like steel drums, cheap synthesizers, Andean panpipes, Indonesian gamelan gongs and all kinds of tinkly percussion, along with echoes everywhere. Songs melt into one another, as the beat moves from Africa to the Caribbean to a digital stutter to synth-pop to a suddenly looming rock anthem. Gang Gang Dance doesn't try to replicate any particular regional style; it's more as if vaguely recognizable elements happen to be on hand. The woman's voice, which is high and quavery like the vocals of Indian film music, briefly floats into earshot and then drifts away as the songs coalesce and drift and realign. "God's Money" is an album of whims and metamorphoses, occasionally annoying but - far more often - thoroughly enveloping, with a mesmerizing, vertiginous charm. That mystery locale must be New York City, where the whole world finds its fractured reflection.