Drawn together amid NYC’s Lower East Side, the men of Chavez – Matt Sweeney, Clay Tarver, James Lo, and Scott Marshall – pioneered a sound that blended jaggedpunk dissonance with the spooky power of ’70s hard-rock hooks.

On Ride the Fader (1996) the band perfected that formula. For proof, look no further than album opener “Top Pocket Man,” where soaring riffs and drum-fill fireworks give way to drop tuned sludge just in time for the chorus.

If you missed it back then, you’re not alone. Ride the Fader did not conquer the globe upon release (Despite what you may be led to believe upon watching the video for "Unreal is Here"). Instead, its legend has accumulated gradually, burnished over decades via cool kid-to-cool kid tip-offs. Truly one of the most stacked and transcendent guitar records of this or any era.

Ride the Fader returns to us today in a clear-colored LP repress. We’ve also unearthed a massive tranche of era-appropriate video content: a new video for “New Room,” the remastered classic “Unreal is Here,” a 1997 live set, Little Twelve Toes (Chavez in the studio), and
the tour documentary Boys Making Music, Music Making Men. What’s more, we’ve also excavated a long-lost version of Boys that includes a commentary track from Scott’s father, the late great director Garry Marshall. “There was a lot of grab-assing, as they used to say in my generation. Jumping around and fooling around,” he observes, capturing the essence of Chavez’s 1996 European run with Guided By Voices.