If you didn’t know, I play in a ska punk band called Dad Jokes. I don’t listen to a ton of ska, but I’ve always enjoyed it. Until we played a show with The Holophonics out of Denton, Texas, then I felt like a complete fraud.

I’ve always considered ska punk to be a pretty superficial medium. It’s great fun, but it’s not exactly an effective medium for high art. It’s the perfect music for skateboarding and chugging Mountain Dew (yes, I did get into ska through Five Iron Frenzy, why do you ask?), but its scope is limited beyond that.

But the Holophonics firmly disagree, and offer up Phantom Arrival as a rebuttal. And it is convincing.

The arrangements are spellbinding. Songs shift into one another in a relentless onslaught. Some songs play like a McCartney medley, containing three or four distinct movements. The Holophonics use their genre marker as a musical center rather than a boundary line. Rhythms change on a dime, shifting from two-tone ska to pop punk to reggae to metal riffage, all while a three-piece horn section blasts the most satisfying ska lines that science can give us.

And over this swirling madness, frontman Eric Daino lays his soul bare with a sincerity that doesn’t wear wit as a cloak as much as a bomber jacket. There’s plenty of wry irreverence, as is befitting a ska band, but there’s a rawness—dare I say a seriousness—that is a rarity in the genre.

When I saw them live (twice now—we played together again last night), I was spellbound by the relentless fury with which they played. They played like they were running a marathon while Kung Fu fighting a pack of bears. And on the record, the exact same energy comes through. It is a whirlwind of upstrokes, horn blasts, and distorted power chords that stretches ska punk to the absolute limit of the genre.

Phantom Arrival is a ska punk masterpiece if ever there was one. And if history is fair to them, the Holophonics will be remembered as one of the greatest ska bands ever.