There was a moment at the turn of the millennium when New York City’s art-school hardcore bands — minor legends like Orchid and The Red Scare, later Hot Cross and Off Minor — were venturing out of stalwart downtown venue ABC No Rio and traveling across the country. Meanwhile, like-minded outfits — Yaphet Kotto, Jeromes Dream, Portraits of Past — visited from other cities on what remained of the old DIY touring circuit. Screamo, the subgenre they occupied, was fleeting. But it made a vital alternative to that era’s tepid garage rock revival.

Amid this there was Gospel. Weirder and more enduring than their contemporaries, the band emerged from the screamo scene with a maximalist vision combining hardcore with prog and Krautrock. Their 2005 album, The Moon is a Dead World, out as a vinyl reissue this month, was a sonic anomaly, a document of that approach taken to it outer limits.

I first saw Gospel in 2003, well before the record came out. They played a far-flung early show at the Gold Rush, a bygone dive bar in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Most people’s introduction to the band was a song called “Congratulations… You’ve Hit Bottom!” that started every set. Sean Miller, tall and greasy-haired — the prototypical bassist — pawed the song open with a fuzzy, circular rumble. Their drummer, Vinny Roseboom, whose dad had schooled him on 70s art rock, played a tight figure that could equally have been lifted from early Genesis or Can’s Tago Mago. Swaying at the front of stage, pelvis thrust forward, was Adam Dooling, his blonde Telecaster wired through a kaleidoscope of echo, making unheavy sounds for heavy music. Every so often, he shouted at the microphone.

Can hardcore be soulful? Gospel was. In contrast with much underground music at that time, they were intricate without being self-consciously “mathy,” forceful without being violent. “I really had never seen anything like it,” said Jon Pastir, who later joined the band on synthesizer, of seeing them for the first time. “There was abandon and power. I was immediately jealous of how cool Adam looked.” You wanted to hate them, but you couldn’t.

I knew the members from Long Island, where we grew up. All three had been in Helen of Troy, a fixture of that scene. But Gospel was an uneasy fit. They lacked the template of a hardcore band: no singer who just sang, no skinny jeans and boys-size-large tees. They looked more like the dirtbag Long Island metalheads I’d grown up with. It was hard to put them in a category, which made them kind of scary. It also made them hard to put a critical finger on. Here, for example, is a ridiculous description from the original Pitchfork review for The Moon is a Dead World:

Gospel are cool. Cool enough to get approval from the white-studded belt, sideways trucker hat, back pocket bandana crowd, and the unadorned (and girlfriendless) music geek crowd.

Gospel was cool, but mostly in the way casual desperation can seem cool. Or in the way that it was cool to see wasted kids from working-class Long Island who still wore JNCOs legitimately not give a fuck whether the DIY scene was as into Genesis as they were. But The Moon is a Dead World isn’t being reissued because of any ephemeral coolness, or even because of the nostalgic resurgence of screamo today. The album is still vital — much more than just a time capsule.