Earlier this year, as Brand New was on the cusp of releasing a new record, I asked my male coworkers to Google the words “Brand New date rape song.” We were considering awarding Brand New’s fifth album Science Fiction the distinction of Best New Music, and I wanted my peers to be clear about this unsettling aspect of the band’s history. At this point, in August, the disturbing allegations against frontman Jesse Lacey—years spent preying on at least two underage Brand New fans, soliciting them online for nude photos and more—had not been made. And yet the music said a lot. Third-wave emo—the 2000s mutation of the sound as sold at Hot Topic, as dialogued on Myspace and LiveJournal, and as broadcast on MTV—was a notoriously sexist commodity. Here was a concrete example.

The song that appears when you Google “Brand New date rape song” is “Me Vs. Maradona Vs. Elvis,” from 2003’s Deja Entendu. It goes, “I got desperate desires and unadmirable plans/My tongue will taste of gin and malicious intent/Bring you back to the bar/Get you out of the cold/My sober straight face gets you out of your clothes.” Lacey later sings such biting lines as “I almost feel sorry for what I’m gonna do” and “If you let me have my way I swear I’ll tear you apart.” Of course, Lacey has denied that these lyrics are autobiographical, claiming that he was describing a nightmare he feared; only a monster would accept these thoughts as his own. Lacey still found them suitable to sing on Brand New’s breakout record, attaching his name to them forever.

Every lyric from Deja Entendu and its predecessor, 2001’s Your Favorite Weapon, is encoded into the neurons inside my skull, a reality that is at once disquieting and comforting. When I switch on the part of my brain that can rattle off those lines with the unneeded ease of a clap-on lamp, it is a surreal reminder of who I was and who I have become.

My relationship with Brand New is complex. I was 13 and living on the south shore of Long Island at the start of 2003, the exact moment when bands like Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, and Glassjaw were catapulting to national profiles and putting my own suburban scene on the alt-rock map. I spent my formative years as a music fan watching all-ages bills full of all-male bands that existed in the wake and under the emotionally tormented spell of our local heroes. They adapted the same tricks: overdriven melodies, gang vocals, roiling angst, Max Martin-levels of uncomplicated catchiness.

The Long Island scene had a rich history before this. In the 1990s, bands like Silent Majority and Mind Over Matter architected the melodic hardcore sound that Brand New and Taking Back Sunday would sugarcoat and blow up. Silent Majority were at least trying to be post-Fugazi male feminists, with songs like “Polar Bear Club” (from 1997’s Life of a Spectator), which included a line hypothesizing about the year 2016: “I just bought a microphone for my kid,” singer Tommy Corrigan daydreams, “’Cause she’s trying out for a band.” But things changed on Long Island.

It strikes me now as no coincidence at all that my favorite Long Island band of the early-2000s, the one I obsessed over hardest, was also the only group I ever saw with a female member: Michelle Nolan, multi-instrumentalist of emotional piano-rockers Straylight Run (which included former members of Taking Back Sunday). But Straylight Run was the exception to the rule in a scene that hardly represented young women. Participating in the Long Island music scene of the mid-2000s changed my life—because it introduced me to the concept of an underground, to shows in practice spaces and temples and VFW halls, but more to the point because it ultimately repulsed me.