One of the surest signs of maturity is allowing yourself to enjoy the music that you liked before you were “too cool” to know better. As I’ve been getting a bit older and realizing that life is too short to heed the jeers of elitist snobs, I’ve been revisiting a lot of the Edgy Teen™ music I loved as a fourteen-year-old.

While a lot of it has proven just as try-hard and toxic as I had dismissed it for being, one band has gained a whole new appreciation in my eyes. That band is Chevelle, whose ability to weave heavy riffs and sweet melodies raises them head and shoulders above their early-aughts alt-metal, radio rock peers.

I first discovered Chevelle while binge-watching Fuse TV as a freshman in high school. The music video for “Send the Pain Below” was in constant rotation, and I was instantly caught both by the song itself and the sweet, sweet snowboarding footage. “Closure” and “The Red” were also in rotation, and those three videos convinced me that when I saw the name “Chevelle” pop up in the bottom corner, I should pay attention. I don’t remember if I ever bought a copy of the CD back then, but I certainly Limewired my fair share of the tracks and burned them to mixes.

But as often happens, I got deeper into more underground music and started regarding radio rock in general—Chevelle included—as pedestrian and asinine. But when I found a cheap copy of this CD last summer (alongside Project 86 and Blindside discs), I was quickly reminded how good this album is—which bade me to jump on this reissue.

It’s not just sentimentality—this album is proper good. It hits that rare blend of aggressive riffs and singalong melodies that Deftones owns and so few others come close to. Even beyond the three singles, most of the tracks play like hits. The opening two tracks, the Eastern-tinged “Family System” and the almost delicate “Comfortable Liar” are just as good as any of the singles. The title track repeats a few almost chant-like, guttural lines, what it lacks in songwriting it more than makes up for in riffs.

And that’s just the first side! The B-side doesn’t have as many immediately recognizable tunes, but there’s no filler here. The most notable standouts are the acoustic closer “One Lonely Visitor” and the mystical “Grab Thy Hand,” which points the most clearly to their ambiguously Christian roots (their debut Point #1 was released on Steve Taylor’s Squint Records, alongside Sixpence None the Richer, PFR, and Burlap to Cashmere).

The real strength of this album though is in the interplay of the performers, whose chemistry is no doubt due to the fact that they are all brothers. The instrumental passages move on with an almost telepathic communication that comes from growing up together, both as people and as musicians. Even the most tough-guy, Ed Hardy-adjacent moments on the record are constructed with more conviction and pathos than their contemporaries.

All of that combines to create a radio rock album that rises above the pejoratives often slung towards radio rock (usually rightly so). And to my great relief, that makes it an album that I can still enjoy without worrying about drawing the ire of hipster elitists, of which I am the chief.