Being ahead of your time sucks. If you’re lucky, posterity will remember you fondly, but chances are that while you’re around, you’re just going to be ignored by posers going crazy over bullshit that will seem terrible in retrospect. Case study: 97a.

Formed in New Jersey in 1993, 97a played the kind of fast, no-bullshit hardcore that would come into serious vogue right around the time they were breaking up, in 2001. The music they left behind sounds like a kind of alternate history, where instead of straying into Krishna consciousness Youth of Today had instead just gotten faster, punker, and skateboarding-er. (Their name is one of the best ever in a subtle kind of way—in case you didn’t grow up ollieing, it’s a measurement of skateboard wheel hardness.)

Most 97a songs adhere to an extremely rigid formula: blasting thrash, chugging YOT-style breakdown, finish line. Making each song sound fresh in this context is a rare gift, but 97a had it: like Capitalist Casualties or Charles Bronson, they approach every song like it’s the first one, which makes their records lively and exciting rather than a tedious slog through blastbeat after blastbeat. (97a, being upstanding metal-free punx, don’t actually use blastbeats.)

You may not find yourself humming the songs afterwards, but a particularly choice breakdown (e.g. “It’s In Our Power”, “Society’s Running On Empty”, “Actions Speak Volumes”—shit, basically every single song on the LP) will get you bedroom moshing in seconds.

Anyways, there’s not really that much to say about a band like this: they came, they thrashed, they broke up. But their music holds up, their record sleeves look great (they had the essentials of a memorable logo and crisp, uniform typefaces, long before Fucked Up brought both back into style), and along the way they avoided a lot of the worst trends of the era: their youth crew sensibilities came through in positive lyrics rather than college sports aesthetics, they avoided long, goofy song titles, and they never succumbed to the allure of metal.

Put simply, they ripped/skated, never hesitated.

You can still get a copy of the LP, Society’s Running On Empty (the most essential 97a release in my book), from Interpunk. Or you can just hit up this blog and download everything.