I swear, sometimes it feels like I never had an emo phase at all. Despite how fully consumed I was by that scene from ages 15 to 18, I stumble upon foundational records that I’ve totally ignored with a startling regularity.

Add another tally for my ignorance, because even though I had listened to Braid’s seminal Frame and Canvas before this decade, I was still well into my twenties when I did hear it, and it took me until this past week to realize I needed it.

And yeah. I’m kicking myself.

I’ve said many times before that the 90s emo scene was more an aesthetic than a sound. Many lists of essential Second Wave/Midwest Emo bands include several bands that don’t sound much like eachother. However, in the midst of this scattered landscape of disparate styles, moods, and timbres, Braid feels like a Rosetta Stone; a lynchpin tying the diverse scene together.

You have the pop sensibility of Jimmy Eat World and the Get Up Kids, the twinkling guitars of Mineral and American Football, the jagged guitars of Jawbox and Fugazi, the deceptive mathy complications of Appleseed Cast and The Casket Lottery, the heart-pounding dynamic shifts of Sunny Day Real Estate, and even moments of the throat-shredding exuberance that defined the separate offshoot of screamo. Where most emo bands seemed to hole up in pockets of the broader emo aesthetic, Frame and Canvas feels like a comprehensive overview.

Don’t read that to mean it sounds scattered. It doesn’t. Not at all. It’s tightly focused and deftly executed. The instruments run a mile a minute around the feral voices of Bob Nanna and Chris Broach. Time changes are frequent, but you’d be forgiven for missing it under the effortlessly catchy hooks. They run through several moods, often in the same song, with full-chested conviction. The sardonic glee of “The New Nathan Detroits” is inverted into a dark groove on “A Dozen Roses.” The breakdown of “Consolation Prizefighter” wouldn’t be too out of place in a metalcore track, but here it makes for a turn that, while surprising, doesn’t feel abrasive.

It’s a forty-minute whirlwind of everything good emo is. And listening on the other side of twenty-five years, its easy to see their fingerprints all over bands like Taking Back Sunday, Mock Orange, Prawn, and the legions of Emo Revivalists that have lifted Braid up as the unsung heroes of the Second Wave that they were. As for me, I’ll be spinning this on repeat to make up for lost time.