As a music fan in the pre-streaming era, one of the best tools at your disposal was the back catalogs of your favorite record labels. And as a youth group kid in the early 2000s, I was naturally a huge acolyte of the Christian punk label Tooth & Nail Records.

As a fan of bands like Further Seems Forever, mewithoutYou, and Stavesacre though, there were some surprises waiting in their back catalog. The label was a surprising hotbed of shoegaze, lo-fi, and dreampop in the ’90s. Punk acts like MxPx and Ghoti Hook were labelmates with bands like Mike Knott, Starflyer 59, and Morella’s Forest. These last two bands would be my entry point into shoegaze, years before I had the language for it.

Ultraphonic Hiss might actually be a better title for their debut Super-Deluxe. That record was a blissfully noisy affair that gave all the spiky barbs of their guitar fuzz plenty of room to play—they apparently even had one fan offer to pray for their guitar amps to get the demons out of it.

Ultraphonic Hiss on the other hand is a gentler affair. The walls of sound that the debut got so much use out of are largely traded for jangling clean guitars and pop hooks that sound closer to Letters to Cleo than Lush (early Lush, anyway). However, it’s hardly toothless. The fuzz pedals aren’t totally absent; they’re just used more sparingly. And perhaps to greater effect. Big riffs punctuate the glossy verses with impressive feats of strength.

While a lot has been said about Morella’s Forest trend from more noisy to less (From Dayton With Love would get even sleeker) it’s important to remember the larger context. The original wave of shoegaze was already winding down. Bands like Lush, Verve Pipe, Lilys, and even the mighty Nothing were trading walls of sound for more pop-oriented sounds. And while Morella’s Forest crashed into the public eye with one of the noisier shoegaze records put to tape, their songcraft didn’t require the cacophony and harshness. Rather, Ultraphonic Hiss is just as good, its catchiness more than making up for what it lost in crushing guitar heft. While many Morella’s Forest fans square up behind either one of the first two albums, I hold both in equal affinity. And thanks to the fine folks at Lost In Ohio, the dream of having both of these records on wax is finally a reality—years after I had given up hope.