How has it already been 25 years since 1999? 25 years since you were a naive pre-teen who hadn’t yet experienced the joy of turning an entire paycheck into a fistful of punk CDs from Wherehouse Music that would eventually get stolen from your Mustang when you forgot to lock it one night. 25 years since your parents told you they wouldn’t buy you anything from one of those aggressive bands that your older brother’s friend with the green hair kept talking about. 25 years since you sat down at that computer your dad brought home from his new job and installed Napster to download them for free with the help of this new thing called the internet.
You’d spend days at a time tying up the phone line to fill the old man’s hard drive with what you hoped were the latest and greatest albums from the ‘90s punk scene, only to discover that most of them were actually computer viruses and mislabeled songs from NSYNC that sounded like they were recorded in an aluminum shed.
It’s hard to say now if any of those albums were worth infecting the computers of everyone your dad emailed that year with digital STDs, but that didn’t stop you from downloading these 25 punk albums in 1999:
Blink 182 “Enema of the State”
You pirated one of the most successful pop-punk albums of all time because you wanted to hear three men in their late 20s tell dick jokes and sing about dating high schoolers. You also somehow managed to install a copy of the Melissa virus, which would eventually render your dad’s PC useless. You learned nothing from this.
Jughead’s Revenge “Pearly Gates”
This wide-ranging album interested you because you were just learning the difference between SoCal Melodic Punk and SoCal Hardcore, and you’d heard it contained solid examples of each. It also contained a program that changed all of the passwords on an infected computer, making it impossible to do whatever your dad did at his job in the ‘90s. You know he hated the job because sometime you would hear him crying in the garage at night, but neither of you will ever talk about it.
Pennywise “Straight Ahead”
The kids at the skatepark all recommended the new Pennywise album, so you decided to check it out. You were delighted to hear their harder tracks beyond the melodic and radio-friendly “Alien.” Less delightful were the random ASCII symbols that showed up whenever you tried to type anything after this download completed. But your growing digital collection of punk music didn’t seem to mind.
Suicidal Tendencies “Freedumb”
Suicidal Tendencies were more hardcore than anything your 12-year-old brain had been exposed to so far, and you wanted more. Your search for more thrash-punk brought another 40 minutes of music to dad’s C drive, while also switching on an encryption setting that made it impossible to listen to your latest illicit acquisition.
No Use For a Name “More Betterness!”
You would download anything released by Fat Wreck Chords back then. Even if this album didn’t blow you away at the time, it was still a worthy addition to your growing folder of punk MP3s. It also happened to be an early carrier of the Magistr virus, which continued to fill that very folder with junk files until the tiny ‘90s hard drive ran out of space.
Pulley “@#!*”
Pulley was another SoCal melodic hardcore band you wanted more of after you heard them on the radio. Their shared members with numerous other punk acts is ironic in hindsight, as it was this particular album that shared pieces of malicious coding with every computer unfortunate enough to be plugged into the same LAN network at your dad’s office.
Good Riddance “Operation Phoenix”
“Operation Phoenix” was another Fat Wreck Chords release you deemed worthy of your digital thievery. This masterpiece of ‘90s hardcore crammed 16 short, heart-pounding songs into just shy of 30 minutes. You were able to listen to the album in its entirety before an embedded copy of the ILOVEYOU virus started opening thousands of browser tabs and crashed the operating system. The irony is your father hasn’t said “I love you” to you for nearly three decades.
Face to Face “Reactionary”
“Reactionary” was a needed return to the band’s punk roots after their recent release was deemed too “alt rock” for diehard fans. Face to Face let fans vote online for which songs to include in the final album, and it’s clear that several of them chose to include “virus that locks the mouse pointer” for anyone who decided to download this album illegally.
Tiger Army “Tiger Army”
This instant classic of a debut release from Nick13’s psychobilly act was unique enough to draw your attention. You used up an entire 100-Hours-Free AOL promotional disk getting this album onto the fastest computer you’d ever seen at the time, only to watch its processing speed slow to a crawl at the hands of a virus created by a bored college student.
Bigwig “Stay Asleep”
This album’s standout “Flavor Ice” is still stuck in your head to this day. Much like the heavy metals that leached out of your father’s dead, discarded computer at the landfill will be stuck in your city’s water table for decades to come. Maybe if you had just borrowed “Stay Asleep” from a friend, you wouldn’t have bricked your poor father’s only source of internet access.
AFI “Black Sails in the Sunset”
AFI hit the perfect middle ground of their constantly changing sound with “Black Sails in the Sunset.” Not as hardcore as their roots, not as emo as their later releases, just perfectly punk from top to bottom. It’s unfortunate that you never got to listen to the copy you downloaded due to a clever piece of malware that disabled the audio output on Dad’s business machine.
The Lillingtons “Death by Television”
The Lillingtons released one of the decade’s pop-punk masterpieces in ‘99. You decided it was worth risking it all to get a copy from an internet stranger. What’s the worst that could happen? There’s no way this SciFi-themed punk album would be the download that brought a midsized regional car insurance provider to a standstill, right?
Camp Kill Yourself “Volume 1”
This Pennsylvania-based rock band wasn’t necessarily “punk” music, but you downloaded it anyway, because you thought the titular skate tape had a good soundtrack. Listening to CKY’s debut album brought back memories of Bam Margera’s pre-”Jackass” crew pranking strangers and pissing on each other. Meanwhile, an included virus redirected all web traffic to one of the era’s low-resolution porn sites, which Margera would probably have found hilarious.
Common Rider “Last Wave Rockers”
Ten years after the breakup of Operation Ivy, which you learned about mere seconds before you heard this album for the first time, frontman Jesse Michaels founded another ska-punk group. Your search for a free copy of “Last Wave Rockers” somehow added a line of code that disabled the Save function in Microsoft Word, the only program your father really needed on a work computer.
Dropkick Murphys “The Gang’s All Here”
You knew, even in middle school, that it would someday be uncool to admit you liked the Dropkick Murphys. So you downloaded this album alone in shame, secretly craving those shrieking bagpipes that the Murphys’ sophomore album didn’t have very much of. Luckily, the fan in your dad’s computer would fill that void with the constant whine of its worn out bearings as it tried desperately to cool down the overheating CPU.
Citizen Fish “Active Ingredients”
This ska spinoff of UK hardcore group Subhumans was hard to find in stores near you. So you took to Napster again in search of more ska for that phase you’d grow to deny in adulthood. You’d also deny that it was your fault the CD-ROM tray would open and close at random after this until your dad snapped it off in a moment of rage and despair.
Sick of it All “Call to Arms”
You needed a burned CD of true hardcore punk to show the kids at school you weren’t a poser, and Sick of it All was exactly that. That’s right, the ska CD they saw in your backpack wasn’t yours! You were just holding it for a friend! You’re a hardcore kid! Too bad you never got to listen to this album, because the Form virus that came with it filled the screen with fake error messages.
7 Seconds “Good to Go”
“Good to Go” was another hardcore album you tried to pirate after one of the many times the IT guy from your dad’s company reformatted his hard drive and removed your secret Music folder. Your search for this album led you to mistakenly install the Sub7 Trojan Horse, which allowed your dad’s work PC to be remotely monitored and controlled without his or his employer’s knowledge.
The Bouncing Souls “Hopeless Romantic”
The title track from the Souls’ 1999 release was echoing in your mind as you went from hopelessly in love with your new favorite music genre, to completely hopeless for the future of the computer you understood just enough to destroy. What was that countdown timer that popped up on the screen? Why won’t the computer display anything other than that infamous Blue Screen of Death?
Hot Water Music “No Division”
After a two-month “breakup” the year before, Hot Water Music reunited to release their third raspy take on what punk music of the next millennium should sound like. The file that contained this album would go on to release the credit card numbers of every customer who used the online payment section of your dad’s company’s website, damaging their reputation permanently.
Teen Idols “Pucker Up”
At this point, you were downloading illegal copies of punk as often as your terrified father was being written up for security breaches at his new job. You barely even listened to “Pucker Up” before you decided it was too repetitive and deleted it to make space for more new albums on Dad’s overworked hard drive. It wasn’t even about the music at this point was it?
Down By Law “Fly the Flag”
You were 12 and you couldn’t understand if the political lyrics on “Fly the Flag” were truly deep or just the pseudo-intellectual rantings of singer Dave Smalley now that he’d gotten his Master’s Degree in political science. You gave this album so little attention, it hardly justified the malicious code that crept into your printer and spread to every new computer that connected to it. The printer? Wow, that’s a new one.
Agnostic Front “Riot, Riot, Upstart”
It was becoming clear that your unsupervised internet access was the source of your dad’s computer problems. You tried to streamline your focus to new releases from classic hardcore outfits and their shouted, 90-second songs. This Agnostic Front album was one of your only downloads that didn’t have any negative effect on the computer you copied it to, at least for a few months until the Michelangelo virus awakened and rearranged your dad’s hard drive.
Diesel Boy “Sofa King Cool”
With an album name so clever and edgy, how could a 7th-grader NOT steal this Diesel Boy offering from the internet? This pop-punk album was fun to listen to, even if it wasn’t worshiped by the music snobs at your school. Was this album good enough to be the last straw for your bewildered father’s career at a now-failing insurance company? To be referenced by name on a pink slip he’d find waiting in his office one day? Probably not.
The Aquabats “The Aquabats vs. the Floating Eye of Death”
Wow, you were REALLY into ska back then, huh? That whole “I got my dad fired” thing didn’t stop you from downloading this, of all albums? Sure, it was more grown-up sounding than the Bats’ Third Wave Ska aesthetic suggested, but your dad was still reeling from losing his job. He’d developed a healthy fear of computers, and catching you using Napster again in your family’s living room is probably what drove him to full Y2K-prepper hysteria. We hope the Aquabats were worth it.