That's partly because X understand the contradictions of being committed to a subculture that's already choked with unacknowledged restrictions. In the year since their debut LP, Los Angeles, was released (selling an extraordinary 60,000-plus copies for tiny Slash Records), X have started to suffer a backlash from L.A. punk-scene purists who view the group's increasing instrumental accomplishment, musical range and national following with suspicion. This conflict certainly adds to the conviction and moral force of Wild Gift, the best album by an American band this year and the finest American punk album ever.

Los Angeles' power -- and flaws -- came from the uneasy question of where X's sensibility diverged from the graphic landscape of horrors it portrayed. Full of ritual violence and precipice-testing, the group's vest-pocket surrealism conveyed as much "me too!" as mea culpa. On Wild Gift, X are constantly defining themselves in relation to communities -- not just the constricting L.A. music establishment that sent them reeling into rebellion in the first place, but the bile-filled, drug-soaked and self-destructive scene they're in yet not entirely of -- hammering out distinctions, solutions and ethical stances with the same high-speed, frenzied accuracy drummer Don Bonebrake uses on his kit.

Wild Gift's sound, too, is cleaner, surer and closer to the brindled, lurching passion that X project onstage. Freed from the distracting keyboards producer Ray Manzarek folded into Los Angeles, guitarist Billy Zoom becomes the music's vital center, coolly unleashing succinct, revelatory guitar lines reclaimed from Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and every junk guitarist worthy of the name. Zoom gives each note the fresh gleam of newly minted silver. The few guitar overdubs work as emphasis, not embellishment.

Above the clattering drive of the music, John Doe and Exene fling out their voices, his ragged and muscular, hers a high-pitched, petulant yowl. These voices clutch and stagger like partners in a three-legged race, pulling together even as they threaten to pull apart. When they blend, it's in a keening, exultant near-unison, with the edgy, archaic feel of Appalachian and other rural musics. The comparison isn't so far out. The pair have spoken in interviews about having "traditional values," which means that they've thought beyond the seductive immediacies of trendy nihilism in order to tackle the problems of what comes afterward -- problems that most punk bands either belittle or ignore. Members of a marginal and, in some ways, a pioneer society, they're looking past subsistence for a sense of dignity and honor. "We're desperate/Get used to it," they sing in an utterly believable chronicle of chaos. Then they move on to more important things, like how to make love and ethics and art work against a backdrop of daily disaster.

Most important, Wild Gift is a punk romance, complete with temptations, estrangements and reunions. John Doe and Exene are married, and their unfashionable monogamy becomes a metaphor for all the precarious foundations they've established, as well as a leap of faith that can redeem all of their efforts. Which doesn't mean the going is easy. Because the idea of commitment takes on such importance when that commitment is the sole island in a sea of chaos, the infidelities that gnaw and rankle are mental ones. The thwarted temptations of "White Girl" -- its untidy, unraveling, Mamas-and-the-Papas harmonies a yearning parody of latter-day California romanticism -- are as harrowing as the consequences of actual betrayal. In "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch," the partner wracked by jealousy is the one who watches the other slip into unconsciousness and flirt with God-knows-what fantasies of "kissing any little child/Who comes along."

Without sacrificing the biting realism that characterized Los Angeles, X reestablish romance and fidelity as abstractions larger than the individual, as concepts that carry authority and demand response, whether abject or rebellious. In the same way, the group's Stations-of-the-Cross symbolism in "Universal Corner" reasserts the literary and emotional weight of Christian myth. Like Billy Zoom with his deft quotations, John Doe and Exene tap into the powerful iconography around them, all the while recognizing its dangers. "Back 2 the Base" is a wildly funny portrait of a soldier raving about Elvis Presley, whose life is obviously more real to him than his own ("I'm the king of rock 'n' roll/If you don't like it you can lump it"). Yet the song has the sad ring of truth. Exene and Doe know they could be on either side of the equation, destroyed by comparison with cultural icons or by becoming them.

"Year 1," Wild Gift's finale, isn't the LP's best cut, or its deepest, but it's where everything momentarily comes together: the untrendy hopefulness and hard-bitten realities, the artistic debts and the toll they take. The number's not just a piece of charming utopianism but an explicit musical refutation of the knee-jerk, nothing-before-the-Sex-Pistols purism of many younger L.A. punks. The lyrics of "Year 1" evoke a new, born-from-the-flames generation, sandblasted clean and starting over from ground zero with "No desperate living class/No Roman Catholic mass/No magazines no TV/No RCA no GE." Yet the tune's a collection of bright fragments from the past: guitar lines wrenched neatly from Eddie Cochran ("C'mon Everybody") and Chuck Berry ("Brown-Eyed Handsome Man"), plus beach-party handclaps and joyful noise. "Year 1" is a compact history of California, home of fad revelation and abortive self-discovery, and, as such, takes its own exultant dawn-worshiping with a grain of salt. X are too worldly and worn to believe in a born-again future -- for music, love or society -- that doesn't involve making an uneasy peace with the past. Their triumph on Wild Gift is that they're also too wise to begrudge the effort.