Let’s go back to the summer of 2003. I’m sixteen years old, with everything that entails: I have my first car, no job, and an obsession with punk music. One of my most constant obsessions was The Illusion of Safety by Thrice, which I had gotten on my birthday a few months earlier. So when I saw an article (in a magazine, no less) hyping their new album, my heart rate quickened. I called my best friend Travis and let him know the news.

A few weeks later, I went over to his house for band practice and he pulled out a copy of The Artist in the Ambulance. We played it on repeat, trading the booklet back and forth, poring over the extensive notes the band members had included for each song. Artist would become one of our cornerstone albums: we would cop drum beats and riffs, thinking no one would notice. I would drive around alone with my car as an isolation booth, trying to emulate the shifts between clean vocals and screams. We very nearly drove six hours to Cleveland to see that tour (without preordering tickets, like idiots), but those plans came to an end due to various bits of teenage family drama.

Twenty years later, Thrice remains one of my favorite bands: I’ve followed them through each step of their varied career. And now, to celebrate the momentous anniversary, the band has offered up a complete re-recording of the entire album, complete with a few choice guest features. And dear reader, it is a wonderful thing.

To say that Thrice has changed a bit since Artist is an understatement. Its follow-up, Vheissu, saw the band expanding their sound with folk, electronica, sludge metal, and post rock—a trend that would be taken to its extreme on The Alchemy Index. Their more recent albums have aimed a bit closer to mainstream rock while retaining their experimental spirit. Compare any track from Artist against anything on Horizons East and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a separate band. With twenty years of artistic shift under their belt, the biggest question going into Revisited is how many liberties they would take with their own material.

Luckily—and perhaps surprisingly, given that penchant for experimentation—they play it more or less faithfully. There are subtle dynamic adjustments, adding nuance to the arrangements in a way that only comes with playing together for over twenty-five years. Thrice is a rare band in that the lineup has remained the same for their entire history, and their chemistry is as strong as it’s ever been here. There are a few guitar lines or drum fills that stray for a moment, like a singer riffing on a familiar melody. But the biggest difference is that in equipment. It’s obvious (to a gearhead like me, anyway) that they’ve adjusted their rigs quite a bit in the last twenty years. A few effects pedals have been swapped out. They’re likely playing through different amps and on different guitars—which is a good thing, because let’s just say Artist is not revered for its guitar tone. I am curious though whether Teppei or Dustin played their baritone guitars on any of these re-recordings. The one spot where it’s obvious is on the guitar solo in the title track, as the tone of the original relied on a wah pedal with a dying battery, creating a scenario that’s next to impossible to replicate.

The mix is also much improved—the original recording struggled with muddy lows and a brittle high end. The stereo field also feels unbalanced and artificially wide. Revisited is crisp and clear, each instrument isolated with perfect clarity. The dynamic range is powerful throughout the spectrum. The bass and kick are full and beefy without sounding muffled. The guitars have a brightness that allows the overtones to sing even at lower chords.

The biggest difference though is Dustin’s voice. There’s no way to keep a voice from changing over twenty years—even if you’re not screaming your lungs out a hundred nights out of the year. His voice has become more and more gravelly with each release, both from age changing the shape of his vocal cords and his technique changing over time. I expected him to sound different on these songs—largely written when he had a different range. But I didn’t expect him to sound this good. There’s a richness to his more mature voice that adds a lot to these songs—his delivery is more nuanced, he has more control over his vibrato, and the line between his clean vocals and screams is blurrier than they were on the original recording. He also makes some new choices, adjusting the timing or melody in subtle and rewarding ways.

He’s not alone though—his voice is joined by a host of guest features, including Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull, Holy Fawn’s Ryan Ostermann, Curl Up and Die’s Mike Minnick (who is in Less Art with the Breckenridge Brothers), and Be Well’s Brian McTernan, who produced the original album. None of these guests are ever thrust into the spotlight. Rather, they provide fuller background vocals, sounding more like they’re singing along to the classic record with the rest of us than guest starring on said record.

The background role of these guests might be a little disappointing for anyone who might want to hear Andy Hull take lead vocals for instance, but doing that would distract from the main purpose: celebrating a record that has meant so much to so many people. And with so many “revisited” albums ending up as either uninspired cash grabs or misguided remix albums, this is a rare gem. The Artist in the Ambulance Revisited isn’t an exercise in squeezing blood out of a corpse. Rather, it breathes new life into a still-vital collection of songs and demonstrates why Thrice has the staying power that they do.

The Artist in the Ambulance Revisited is available now.

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