In their nearly 50 years since forming in Leeds during the punk era of the late ’70s, the Mekons have created a cohesive body of work marked by a certain aesthetic and creative itch, even while amassing an idiosyncratic catalog and frequently seemingly deconstructing whatever had come before. Indeed, there’s an agitant attitude that’s also been a constant, so that by the time of only their second single, “Where Were You,” the Mekons were already casting a collective scant eye at punk’s heyday as they looked toward the future. In those subsequent decades, they have been in and out of step with the times at varied periods, but always been a source of antagonistic ideas (ideals?) and musical ingenuity and integrity.

The band, which featured the lineup that’s made up the Mekons since the mid-80s (only Lu Edmonds, who was presumably off on tour with PiL, was missing), played to a soldout crowd at the Boston outpost of the City Winery chain last week in support of what’s perhaps its strongest record of the past couple decades, Horror. As founding member and singer/guitarist Jon Langford pointed out (and emphasized by screaming the name of the record every time the band played a song from it), it’s a sign of the times we’re living in (as are several members of the band, unless they’ve come to their senses and moved back to the UK). The alarm bells were loudest on “War Economy,” a defiant cut sung by another founding member, singer/guitarist Tom Greenhalgh, who posited, “You have no right to rule us.” Numerous moments from the band’s past work would also seem equally prescient, but “Millionaire” from 1993’s I ♥ Mekons was a good, if obvious, choice as it elicited the crowd to sing the song’s ironic refrain of “I love a millionaire.”

Nevertheless, some of the best moments of the night were more sentimental than topical. “Chivalry,” and “Last Dance” from the band‘s seminal Fear and Whiskey were among the highlights, with Susie Honeyman’s fiddle underpinning Greenhalgh’s reveries. Meanwhile, on “Neglect” (from 2000’s Journey to the End of the Night), Langford took the lead, melding his low-key reggae-tinged riff with Rico Bell’s “chest piano” (as he called it) for a pleasant surprise. Still, it was hard to ignore the raucous poignancy of “Hard to Be Human” (also from Fear and Whiskey) and the cathartic yowling of its title that closed their first set.

The band left the stage, but returned shortly for a four-song encore. No surprise, it would finish with “Where Were You,” but it was the song that preceded it, “Memphis, Egypt,” and its refrains about rock & roll and verses like, “The battles we fought were long and hard,” that resonated and revealed more of the band’s everlasting ethos. As singer Sally Timms commented at one point, we need to keep our spirits up during these difficult times, and this show certainly did a good job of elevating them.