“Seems everything that I’ve got has been had by somebody else,” Carina Round sang at the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday night, neatly describing the tour she’s sharing with the Cinematics. Ms. Round is English, and the Cinematics are from Scotland, and like a lot of other current British rockers they’re mining the post-punk of the 1980s and 1990s for ways to build songs.

There are worse places to look. Post-punk made the most of internal frictions — choppy guitars and sustained melodies, abrasiveness and elegance, desire and defiance — and devised durable strategies for making lean, dramatic songs. The trick is either to use those ideas without sounding too imitative, or to make them so overpowering that it doesn’t matter where they came from.

With her black hair, a red dress and a guitar she played with precise aggression, Ms. Round couldn’t help summoning images of P J Harvey. Far from shying away from the comparison, she drew on Ms. Harvey’s starkly volatile structures, leaps between vocal registers and splinters of blues-rock. But she also had some of Siouxsie Sioux’s biting quaver and some wildcat yowls and shrieks of her own.

Ms. Round’s songs, many of them from her album “Slow Motion Addict” (Interscope), moved between contemplation and confrontation, between sullenness and passion. She sang about love as an elemental force in lyrics about fire, madness, blood and death. Before her last song she kicked her shoes halfway across the stage to dance barefoot. With dynamic surges and full command of their obsessions, the songs soon moved the audience from chattering support-act indifference to full fascination.

The Cinematics switched between two guitar-driven schools of post-punk: one jagged and staccato, one immersive. Scott Rinning, the lead singer, has the long-breathed croon of singers like Morrissey, Bono and Ian McCulloch (of Echo and the Bunnymen), and enough unabashed melodrama to deliver lyrics like “I’ve been breaking my back with the weight of your heart.”

Behind him the band sometimes meshed terse, contentious guitar riffs along the lines of Gang of Four and, more recently, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand or the Arctic Monkeys. More often it let its guitars ring and build up washes of tremolo, in good mope-rock style; one song added recorded glockenspiel sounds in direct homage to U2’s first album. That style made for some unctuous moments, but when the Cinematics meshed it with a galloping beat in the breakup song “Maybe Someday,” the old methods still paid off.