It would be foolish to call “The Weirdness,” the Stooges’s first studio album in 33 years, long awaited. Few fans thought they would ever get another chance to even see the legendary punk unit after it broke up in 1974, and no one necessarily expected lead singer Iggy Pop and the Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott, to create or record new music after the band reunited in 2003 to play concerts featuring material from their first two albums. What has been long awaited is a rock ‘n’ roll revisionism that ranks the Stooges among the genre’s true prophets — and this album arrives in a world where that has taken place, even if it does nothing to enhance that world.

If the band’s three untouchable studio records — 1969’s “The Stooges,” 1970’s “Funhouse,” and 1973’s “Raw Power” — were a bit too much for even the heaviest metal listeners of their time to take, the ripples they made were keenly felt in the approaching punk, no-wave, and grunge movements, and gradually created an audience that was lacking the first time around.

Those three original albums, like those of fellow cult icons the Velvet Underground and Big Star, were fairly divergent both among and within themselves, veering from hurtling punk touchstones (“I Wanna Be Your Dog”) to tolling mantracum-Gregorian chants (“We Will Fall”) to James Brown-via-Pharoah Sanders stomps (“Funhouse”). By contrast, the dozen rockin’ tunes on “The Weirdness” are utterly homogenous.

Whereas the original Stooges would pound out repetitive, ironclad riffs with the same unyielding determination as other underappreciated drone-blues “primitives,” such as Fred McDowell and Robert Pete Williams (as opposed to the Rolling Stones, Cream, and other, more commercial descendants of slicker 12-bar types), the new songs stick to the usual verse-chorusverse rock structure and are over and out in two to four minutes. Could the band have been listening to the Strokes, who’s entire oeuvre is based on Mr. Pop’s “Lust for Life”?

In his prime, Mr. Pop bridged the gap between the Doors’s Jim Morrison and the Sex Pistols’s Johnny Rotten — stripping away the poetic pretensions of the former and zooming in on his 2-3 note melodies and post-Sinatra croon, his deviant sexuality, and his flair for onstage mayhem and exhibitionism. He also created a lyrical emphasis on teenage boredom that would come to help define punk; the lyrics were based on things he overheard Detroit kids saying at the local burger joint. Lines like “another year for me and you / another year with nothing to do” captured the monosyllabic frustration and drug-induced confusion of high school purgatory in a suitably verité style for the first time in the rock era. This proved to be the Stooges’s most significant influence on the Ramones (“Now I wanna sniff some glue / now I wanna have something to do”), the Sex Pistols (“Pretty Vacant”), and the Clash (“I’m So Bored With the USA”), who were musically more indebted to Phil Spector, the New York Dolls, and Mott the Hoople, respectively.

But the only sonic parallel to be made between the Stooges of “The Weirdness” and the Stooges of “Raw Power” is the belch that opens both records. Mr. Pop fails to reclaim the menagerie of vocal sounds that he unleashed on “Funhouse” and “Raw Power,” and then ditched during his extended solo career. His ad-libs on tracks such as “The End of Christianity” and “Passing Cloud” are unconvincingly melodic. Where’s the madman who howled “I feel alright” on “1970” in a way that sounded like he was anything but alright? When he sings “My sanity is under attack / I got a crazy look in my eye” on “Mexican Guy,” he sounds like the stone cold sober professional he is, flipping through his own pre-rehab/mental asylum back pages rather than baring a tortured soul in the heat of the moment.

Real people are allowed to mellow with age (it’s interesting that the last song, “I’m Fried”, is an uptempo rewrite of “[I’m] Loose” from “Funhouse” — a midlife Freudian slip?), but Mr. Pop is like a Muppet; if another Muppet movie were made tomorrow I’d expect Kermit the Frog to act just like he did 30 years ago, and I’d contend that Mr. Pop should be held to the same showbiz standard.

Guitarist Ron Asheton fares better. The liquid wah-wah squeals on “You Can’t Have a Friend” and the arresting solo on “Greedy Awful People” are as striking as anything he waxed in 1969. Saxophonist Steve Mackay, whose Promethean, free jazz-inflected solos helped make “Funhouse” so distinctive, is sadly hemmed in until “I’m Fried,” where he overdubs some braying honks that faintly echo the freakout/walpurgisnacht of “Funhouse” finale “L.A. Blues.”

In the booth, the veteran Steve Albini has sagely recorded and mixed the album in vintage fashion: vocals back in the mix, the bass more felt than heard, guitars and drums loud and upfront. A long-time fan of the Stooges, he captures them as effectively as anyone could, but his efforts are wasted on a set of songs that emerge as the weakest the band has ever written.

The Stooges will perform March 9 at the United Palace Theater (4140 Broadway, at 175th Street, 212-568-6700).