Throughout music history, there are several records that have a mismatched ratio of commercial success to lasting influence. Albums like Velvet Underground & Nico, of which it is often said that not many people listened to it, but everyone who listened to it started a band. Albums that made little impact on the larger cultural conversation but left an extinction-event-sized crater in those who heard them.

Fantastic Planet is one of those albums. It is a record that was mostly ignored upon its release, but history has reevaluated it as a revered classic.

And rightly so: thanks to its blend of HUMmy space rock, Jawboxy abrasiveness, Smashing Pumpkins guitar work, and Nirvana-esque hooks, Fantastic Planet is arguably the most concise distillation of 90s alt rock ever produced, and hits just even harder three decades later.

Personally, my relationship with this record is a complicated one. I first became aware of Failure through A Perfect Circle’s cover of “The Nurse Who Loved Me“—not that I realized that it was a cover for a while. A few of the other tracks leaked into my P2P downloads list, like the bouncy “Pillowhead” or their modest hit “Stuck On You,” the Bond-credits music video of which I’m sure I saw on an MTV flashback.

But it was only more recently—maybe in the last five years—that I realized how important the record is. But with vinyl copies selling for upwards of $400, I banned myself from listening to it and thus deepening my longing for it, added a Google alert and waited patiently for a reissue. When it finally came last year (preceding a forthcoming documentary), I pulled the trigger without a thought—$50 price tag be damned.

And while this perspective might be comparing that price to the alternative, this record is worth every cent. With the hindsight of three decades, it’s easy to see the ersatz outline of this record stretched across time in the sonic shifts of bands like Deftones, Cave In, and even fellow space rockers Shiner, as well as in the newer crop of 90 revivalists like Cloakroom, Lume, Narrow Head, Teenage Wrist, Superheaven, and so many others that are riding the line between shoegaze and grunge.

However, so many influential records are hampered by the production technology of their time. Records that were once heralded as the loudest thing put to tape sound anemic and brittle by today’s standards (looking at you, Psychocandy). Fantastic Planet doesn’t suffer the same fate. In fact, the mix is so muscular and vibrant that I had to check to see if this particular vinyl edition had been remastered (I haven’t seen anything to indicate that has been). In fact, it might even sound fuller than many modern records trying to ape the same tones. For an example, listen to “Heliotropic,” in which a gnarly fuzz bass drives the song while ambient guitars float ever upwards.

With seventeen tracks and a near-seventy-minute runtime, Fantastic Planet is colossal in every sense. To modern listeners, it might be difficult to get through in a single sitting, but it’s designed to. Its tracklist is expertly paced. Segues punctuate the tracklist, many of the tracks fade seamlessly between one another, and the record is bookended by the same mechanical whirring noise—no doubt a byproduct of the CD era when this would have been designed to be played on repeat all. However, every track is just as delicious out of context as well. So whether you only have time for a couple of morsels or if you have a chunk of time to sit down and digest the entire record, it will prove to be worth your time.