Which is one of the reasons Recover’s jump from selling their demos in the University Of Texas at Austin student union to joining the upper ranks of America’s punk underground to climbing aboard one of the biggest record labels on the planet, with one of the most anticipated rock albums of 2004, is so friggin’ remarkable. The other reason actually has to do with the sound coming out of the speakers—but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s talk about… Green Day?

Guitarist Robert Mann groans. “We’ve been Recover for around five years now, but we were playing together since we were 12 years old; we’re like brothers,” he says. “We were in middle school when we started—of course we were playing covers.” But growing pains can haunt you forever, and when Mann recalls Recover’s days as childhood friends, before they even had a band name, playing Green Day covers, one roll of his eyes is all it takes to change the subject. And what a change of subjects it is, when you think about it: the transformation from “that band” to, you know, that band—the one that made Rodeo And Picasso, Recover’s 2001 debut album of blistering post-hardcore for Fueled By Ramen; the one that followed it up with 2002’s refined, nuanced and altogether matured Fiddler Records EP Ceci n’est pas Recover; and the one that’s taking the best of both those releases to a whole new level with This May Be The Year I Disappear.

Recorded over an eight-month lockdown of sorts in Austin scene fixture (The Impossibles, The Stereo) and producer (Kissing Chaos, August Premier) Rory Phillips’ house, and inspired by some of the ups, downs and way-outs of that same period, This May Be The Year I Disappear isn’t just Recover’s major-label debut; it’s also their debut, period—the album where they finally dive to the core of who they are and let rip. “I think this album sums up what we were trying to do before, but we were so fresh and green, we didn’t know how to get our point across,” says Mann. And not just musically, but thematically, as well—which may explain why Keyes describes Disappear’s lyrics as a sort of “audio diary.” “Basically, this record is an exploration of a young person’s state of mind,” says Keyes, 22. “It’s taken from the way I see and feel. We wrote most of it last summer, and I was just writing about what was going on with my friends and me—just being young and crazy, and not caring, because everybody’s like that when you’re that age.”

Recover’s collective youth also goes a long way toward explaining the musical inspirations that run through This May Be The Year I Disappear. Co-produced by Phillips and Gary Gersh, and mixed by Andy Wallace (Nirvana, Helmet, System of A Down), the album is a glorious collision of new and old. Even in the remakes of older songs (“Push Push” and “My Only Cure”), Disappear is a constant push-and-pull between the angular, aggressive sounds the band members heard firsthand, growing up in punk rock and hardcore, and the classic rock they heard day and night over the radio, growing up in Austin. Says Mann, “We were basically going for a modern blend of everything we like.” For instance, “Light Up The Night” sounds like a science experiment grafting AC/DC’s headstocks onto Fugazi’s body via The Eagles’ pickups. (“That song is a call to arms,” says Keyes. "It’s like, ‘Let’s go—let’s take this place by storm.”) The driving “Disappear” and subdued “Crashed” imagine a world where the late-’90s post-hardcore underground could live peacefully with the grunge scene it replaced. And the soaring, anthemic “L.A.,” which Keyes says, “could either be about a girl or about the city,” is a pop song shining through a punk-rock prism. At the same time, one catches snippets of electronic music, dub, even ’70s AOR throughout Disappear—seriously, folks, that’s a talk box Mann is playing on “Night Of The Creeps.”

“We really wanted to make a record that was different and interesting, and not the same as everything that’s going on right now,” says Keyes. “I know everyone says that, but we really wanted to unite people, no matter what kind of music they’re into, with this record; to make people feel something different than what they’re used to feeling when they listen to music.”

Of course, what you’re hearing on CD is half the appeal: From day one, Recover have more than earned their reputation as one of the underground’s most scorching live acts, touring with (and making fans out of) bands as diverse as Jimmy Eat World, Coheed And Cambria, Taking Back Sunday, A.F.I., Bad Religion, Thursday, Thrice, Brand New, Hot Water Music, Glassjaw, Poison The Well, Get Up Kids, Finch—the list is endless. And so, it seems, is the roster of Cobras—the ad-hoc “gang” of tourmates and other musical misfits (including Taking Back Sunday, The Used, Jimmy Eat World and Atmosphere) centered around Recover, whose name keeps turning up in the strangest places. (Anyone else played the “Cobra” pack for Half-Life Counter-Strike?) So, yeah—your favorite band’s favorite band? Trust us: You don’t know the half of it.

Says Mann, “We don’t feel like we fit in with the whole hardcore/melodic-punk/screamo/whatever’s-going-on scene that people associate us with. At the same time, we’re not some kind of trendy band a hipster can just get into to feel cool or whatever. The way we see it, there’s good music—it could be anything from classic rock to 50 Cent, and everybody should be allowed to embrace it. I guess if we had a ‘mission,’ that’d be it: We just like good music, and we tried to blend it all together on this record so people will hear it, and, hopefully, it’ll make their tastes more diverse, too.”

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