At some point, you realize that Wedren’s whisper has expanded into a gale-force bellow, hard-panned and all around you. The road that goes just goes and goes, soaring skyward, hammered flat on anvil-sized chords, buoyed by Larson’s screaming harmonics. The fade-out is unambiguous in its implications: This song will never, ever end. It’s still going, way, way out there, like the Voyager spacecraft.

A lot of major-label alt-rock signings didn’t have very happy endings, but all things considered, things could have turned out worse for Shudder to Think. The album sold decently enough—it had moved 60,000 units by 1997. Goldstone, the A&R who signed them, had moved on to Dreamworks by the time they returned to the studio to record a follow-up, 1997’s 50,000 B.C., but he stuck by them, visiting them in the studio to offer his ear, and advice, as a friend.

The album sessions were not without difficulty. In the aftermath of Pony Express Record, by Wedren’s own admission, he went a little crazy—couldn’t sleep at first, then couldn’t stop itching. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma; he was still in treatment while they were recording 50,000 B.C., in fact. The radiation dried him out terribly, turned his mouth and throat into sandpaper; in between vocal takes, he’d guzzle gallons of water. “I would just go glug glug glug glug, and then sing,” he told Anti-Matter last year. “Glug glug glug glug, and then sing. And then whoever the Pro-Tools engineer was, after we were done recording, would have to go through all my vocal takes and have to remove all the glugs.”

Wedren and Larson’s friendship faltered; each wanted to steer the ship. Where Wedren wanted to take the follow-up in even more extreme directions, the others just wanted to rock. He tried to mollify his bandmates, he says—“write something more soulful, more pop, something that would make Nathan happy and would get the band back in lock step with one another”—but, like so many attempts to save a floundering relationship, it was too little, too late. 50,000 B.C. isn’t a bad album, but it doesn’t have the brilliance of Pony Express Record; it feels like a compromise, like they’re holding back their more esoteric urges—precisely the instincts that made their earlier work so singular.

“I just feel like the point of music is to get sprung,” Wedren said last fall. “To be free of this body, this world, and these rules…. I just want to stay slippery and free.” Shudder to Think’s songs have endured, he theorized, because they’re loose enough, “in this liminal space between meaning and interpretation. I can sing them and have whatever associations I have to the imagery that are relevant to me now, or even revisit where I was and whatever those associations were back then in a more dear and tender way.” He told the interviewer that later that day, he’d be going to rehearsal with his boyhood pal David Wain and some other friends who have a group called Middle Aged Dad Jam Band. They were getting ready for a New Year’s show; at Wain’s urging, he was going to sing some Shudder to Think songs. “Is that going to be strange?” Wedren asked. “No. It’s not going to be strange at all. I love those songs. They’re all very sturdy boats, you know?”

It’s a good metaphor—over the years, those sturdy boats carried Shudder to Think through some choppy waters, and to once unfathomably distant shores. Here’s another one. The one-of-a-kind Pony Express Record is a unicorn, powerful and iridescent and lithe, in shiny black latex. A sexy horse, charging triumphantly into the unknown.