I don’t remember the events that led to me acquiring this CD as a seventeen year old. I don’t know if there was a music video I saw or a friend who grabbed me by the lapels and forced me to listen to it. Maybe I just saw the psychedelic album art and a band name I recognized and bought it blind.

In either case, this album of mystical, vaguely funky alt-rock managed to capture my attention when I was up to my ears with bands like Thrice, Thursday, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Fugazi. And now, eighteen years later, it still holds up.

It was almost impossible to be a teenager in the mid-aughts without knowing who Incubus was. Besides the ubiquitous ballad “Drive” that had been dominating airwaves for years, their 2001 record Morning View cast a reputation for larger than itself, fueled by the urban legend that the band had closed themselves off from all outside music for a year before recording it (I can’t verify this at all). I had spent a decent chunk of bandwidth downloading various tracks on Limewire and had pegged them as a sort of Deep™ band that outpaced most of their contemporaries on modern rock radio—especially after outgrowing their own early numetal funk rock.

But despite the great ambitions of the albums before it, A Crow Left of the Murder feels like effortless rock and roll. There are fewer spaced out jams like “Drive” or “Aqueous Transmission” and far less of anything you’d call funk rock or numetal—and if there’s any turntablism, it’s hidden deep, deep in the mix. Instead, the band offers a more straightforward sound that sounds less designed for yoga studios or white dudes with dreadlocks. Instead, there are propulsive, anthemic rock songs like the title track, “Pistola,” and “Beware! Criminal.”

Of course, it isn’t just straightforward radio rock. While the sounds that made their earlier records might not be as overt, they’re not absent. Tracks like “Priceless” and the swinging “Zee Deveel“lay the funk on heavy. The tender “Southern Girl” could easily have been an outtake from Make Yourself or Morning View. Even the grandiose anthems hide have more bubbling beneath the surface than a casual listen might suggest. “Megalomaniac“—far and away worth the price of the disc on its own—indulges in prog noodling and Eastern influences in between massive choruses. The jagged “Sick Sad Little World” similarly weaves between transcendental jamming and cathartic refrains. The jangling “Talk Show on Mute” is a superb pop song, creating an accessible, hook-laden single without ignoring their voice.

Is it a perfect album? Of course not. Given that it’s a major label release from the CD era, it’s runtime is a bit bloated. A couple tracks could have dropped without much loss. But when it hits, it freakin’ hits. The kiss offs are satisfyingly acid-tongued, the love songs are alluringly sexy (even if my evangelical teen self was greatly distressed over the lyric “pink tractor beam into your incision”), and throughout the whole record, the hooks are as sweet as can be. While many bands from the same scene have been largely dismissed in recent discourse, A Crow Left of the Murder stands as a testament to their staying power. Y’know, along with just about everything else theyv’e done.