By now, anyone who knows me should already know that there are some inexplicable and inexcusable gaps in my music knowledge. There are plenty of bands that I should have grown up loving but ignored for one reason or another.

In the case of Hot Water Music, my suspicion is that I had confused them for Poison the Well, who I never cared for. And yes, I know how stupid that was.

I’ve set to mending these gaps over the last few years, but few of those undertakings have been as satisfying as Hot Water Music’s Caution, a fiery burst of melodic post hardcore that checks just about every box of what I was looking for as a high schooler.

The record starts with the flawless “Remedy,” an anthem imbued with wounded hope and fully body aches delivered in a half-screamed, half-sung bark over frantic guitars. While much of the album lives in the same ragged post-hardcore, the second track “Trusty Chords” takes a delightfully melodic detour into bouncing emo and pop punk. Tracks like “One Step to Slip” live in the space between their fury and melody, switching between raw shouted verses and singalong choruses.

But what strikes me most listening twenty years later is just how many similarities I hear from other bands that me and my friends were obsessed with at the same time. The delayed guitars of “It’s All Related” make me think of moments on Thursday’s War All the Time. More melodic songs like “Trusty Chords” and “Not For Anyone” have moments that resemble a cross between The Ataris and Get Up Kids (though with a much rougher voice). The scraping guitar work throughout the record bears a close resemblance to The Alkaline Trio, who HWM released a split with before this record. The vocal interplay between the two lead singers and the agile rhythm section feels more like Fugazi than most bands overtly trying to rip them off (especially on tracks like “Sweet Disasters” and “Alright For Now“).

And of course, I don’t mean any of that to suggest that this sounds derivative of any other acts. Rather, something was stirring in the waters of punk music in the early aughts, and Hot Water Music seems to have been tapped into a deeper dreg of that stream than most of their contemporaries, offering one of the purest distillations of whatever essence punk bands were chasing at the time. I didn’t listen to this record until my thirties (yes, that’s ridiculous, I know), but every second of this record gives even me a strong sense of nostalgia. This record is going to get a whole lot of play alongside the other high school classics in my collection.