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One of the gifts (and curses) of getting older is celebrating the 20th or 25th anniversary of an album that never feels quite as old to you as it actually is. I’m 43, and this is happening to me constantly. Coming-of-age classics getting reissued in several colorful vinyl variants, tours where most band members look like shit but need the money, and my peers paying for meet-and-greets like 16-year-old girls rushing the barricade at a Gracie Abrams show. It’s weaponized nostalgia that targets adults with disposable income, pleased as punch to spend money on tickets, Ubers, overpriced hazy IPAs, and a babysitter in order to spend 3 hours reliving the 2-to-5-year period when they had fun, before the perils of real life set in, when a 401K was so far off it felt like a mirage. The latest artist celebrating a wanna-feel-old quarter-century anniversary is Dashboard Confessional, whose breakthrough second album The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most was released on Vagrant Records in 2001.

Before founding Dashboard Confessional in 2000, singer-songwriter Chris Carrabba worked as a special education after-school program director at an elementary school in Boca Raton, Florida. He balanced his career in education with music, including time in the shitty Christian band Further Seems Forever, before his diary-like solo songs launched him to superstardom. 2001 was a strange time. Britney Spears’ sugary-sweet Max Martin and Rami Yacoub-penned hits on one side, Limp Bizkit’s “Did it all for the nookie” dum-dum Spencer’s Gifts alternative-radio rock on the other. What the people who gravitated toward Dashboard Confessional at the time never wanted to admit was how much his music split the difference between the two. Carrabba was great-looking, like a boy bander who subscribed to HeartattaCK and listened to Coalesce: a slick black gelled baby pompadour, colorful full-sleeve tattoos, and an acoustic guitar. It made sense for a very specific kind of person—someone aging out of MTV’s TRL but not quite ready to scour message boards for show listings.

His roots in the hardcore scene made him a polarizing figure. Of course, I liked the music a lot; as entrenched as I was in the heavy shit, Dashboard Confessional was undeniably catchy, melodic, and you could listen to it around women, which wasn’t true of Orchid or Catharsis. Like most products of hardcore, Dashboard Confessional was deeply sincere. Carabba’s lyrics were so simple and over the top that it was either going to explode or go down as corny as hell.

I had seen Dashboard play a few times on his ascent, but the last time I saw him, I knew it was a rocket ship. We were friends with New Found Glory, a pop-punk band with deep hardcore roots; their de facto leader, Chad Gilbert, had been in Shai Hulud, and they were in Atlanta to play a show at a now-defunct all-ages venue called The 513 Club on a now popular gentrified stretch of Edgewood. The main support on the bill (which also included Midtown and Hot Rod Circuit) was Dashboard Confessional. The album had just come out, and he was bubbling. It was early December, but the room was so packed that the walls were sweating. He got up on stage alone, and the room screamed every lyric back to him in a way that I still haven’t experienced. People believed every word he said and wanted to be in a room full of people who felt the same way. It was one of those rare moments, like when I saw The xx play The Mercury Lounge, that I just knew how big this thing was going to get.