Last summer, in the midst of global pandemic, some friends and I started a remote band called Bares His Teeth. As often happens when you write music together, we started sharing a lot of music with one another. We shared music that inspired us, songs that we wanted to emulate, and just songs we loved that bore no educational value to our own songwriting but we wanted to share anyway.

But towards the end of the year, the band chat became obsessed with one release in particular: the album Liminal by the small German outfit Entropy. It was hard to find, but that didn’t stop three-fifths of us from ordering it.

Entropy’s blend of post-hardcore, shoegaze, and pop-punk isn’t a rarity these days—plenty of bands have mixed these influences, many of them to great success. But there’s something pure about Entropy’s approach that goes beyond nostalgia. Surely, songwriter and founder Hans Frese grew up on bands like Quicksand, Helmet, HUM, Smashing Pumpkins, Fugazi, and Jawbox—those influences are plainly audible, but those bands feel more like the grammatical structure of his musical language than a picture he’s trying to paint-by-numbers.

The vocabulary is here—big, pounding drums, thick guitar riffs, pummeling bass lines, and anthemic, melodic vocal lines. But it doesn’t as much sound like an album influenced by all the post hardcore and shoegaze bands of the 90s as much as it sounds like a forgotten gem from the same era. Listening through it, it hits on the same feeling I get listening to so many of the 90s albums I listened to in high school. There are shades of Unwound, Hopesfall, and even more emo-leaning acts like The Ataris, the Juliana Theory, and Jimmy Eat World.

“Terminal (adj)” opens the record with an angular urgency, its dissonant verses punctuated with a big singalong chorus. “The Enemy Doesn’t Sleep” leans more toward the dark side of the template with crushing riffs and a plodding rhythm. But this time, they take a lot longer to relieve the sonic tension, staying dissonant and ominous until the bridge. “Northern Line” goes even heavier, driven by a low, overdriven bass and relentless kick drum while the vocals and lead guitar soar above it all—downtune it a step down and put more reverb on the vocals, and you’re practically in Spotlights territory.

This heavy track is followed by one of the bigger surprises on the record: the bright, cheery “Age of Anxiety,” which even has a coda of harmonized “oohs” over its mostly clean guitars.

It’s a brief detour, because the following track, “February 20, 1974,” is heavier than anything that preceded it, but more HUM than Helmet, Frese’s voice never exerting itself beyond long drawn-out notes. “General System Theory” picks up the tempo again, bringing the closest thing to straightforward hardcore on the disc—save for the clean vocals. That particular melding of hardcore punk energy with space rock’s atmosphere and sung melodies hits me in a very similar way to Tooth & Nail stalwarts Stavesacre, who I happened to rediscover around the same time as I found this album. “Knausgardian” may be my favorite track, on the strength of its heavy slowcore guitar lines, soaring, life-affirming vocals, and spoken word interlude that sounds like it was ripped right out of an Ataris song.

The balance between nostalgia and originality is always a tough line to walk—I know I say this all the time, but only because it’s true. It’s a difficult thing to create something that sounds enough like the beloved art of yesteryear that still sounds different enough to make itself necessary. But if there was any struggle staying upright on Liminal, Entropy never lets on.