For many people, At The Drive-In’s career starts and ends with 2000's Relationship of Command, and it’s easy to see why. The band’s third album shot them into a new orbit, one that saw their song “One Armed Scissor” get radio airplay and slide into regular rotation on MTV2. Eventually, it’d achieve even further ubiquity, as “One Armed Scissor” would earn a coveted spot in both Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games. That sounds awfully quaint now, but those games were a major cultural force in the mid-2000s, and it did wonders for a band that broke up just as they were crossing over into the mainstream. Yet, despite Relationship of Command’s legacy, it was 1998’s In/Casino/Out that laid the groundwork for all of it, remaining a document of the moment when one of punk’s most exciting bands discovered what they wanted to be.

Though At The Drive-In formed in 1994, it’d take a few years for anyone in the punk scene to take notice. The band’s hometown of El Paso, Texas, lacked a punk scene of much renown, and their early material was energetic, yet largely unremarkable. The band’s two main players, vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Jim Ward, anchored At The Drive-In, and for a couple years the rest of the lineup swirled around them.

At the time, their influences were equally fluid, as early At The Drive-In releases flipped between may of the sounds that were gaining a foothold in punk. At various points, it was easy to hear a bit of Lookout! Records-style pop-punk, but Bixler-Zavala and Ward were equally as taken with the ambition of bands on Dischord Records as well as the spastic chaos of the San Diego bands populating the Gravity Records roster. They’d manage to meld these things into a good song here and there, but never did they become more than the sum of these influences.

It wasn’t until 1996, when the band added guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, bassist Paul Hinojos, and drummer Tony Hajjar, that At the Drive-In would begin to settle into itself. Ward took a brief sabbatical from the band that same year, but when he returned to At The Drive-In a year later, it was with a newfound vigor. As a live entity, Bixler-Zavala and Rodrigues-Lopez turned At The Drive-In into a peerless act. They flailed around stages with no regard for their bodies; swinging microphones, bashing guitars, and climbing anything that could hold them. On the other hand, Ward, Hinojos, and Hajjar planted their feet and plowed through the songs, keeping the train on the track while their other members ran wildly through the cars.

While plenty of punk bands were renowned for their live sets, it was rare that a band captured that on record. But just as At The Drive-In became the talk of punk circles on the strength of their performances, they also finally synthesized their influences into a sound that was distinctly theirs. At The Drive-In became less referential by the time they began writing what would become In/Casino/Out. Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics became more impressionistic, skewing away from traditional punk song fodder and embracing a kind of linguistic splicing that bordered on the nonsensical. Similarly, Rodriguez-Lopez would take his love of salsa music and encourage Hajjar and Hinojos to incorporate the sounds that permeated El Paso, no longer relegating them to simple, four-on-the-floor beats.