Punk rock.
Loud, fast, and built to provoke.

Thursday's "Understanding in a Car Crash," the lead single from Full Collapse (April 10, 2001), was written by Geoff Rickly about a real high school tragedy: his girlfriend was driving when his best female friend was killed in an accident. This is the story of how that grief became the song that defined a genre, and why it still holds up on the album's 25th anniversary.

London Calling, released December 14, 1979, is the record where The Clash stopped arguing about what rock and roll was allowed to be and became it. Produced by Guy Stevens at Wessex Sound Studios in London, its 19-track, four-sided architecture argues that punk conviction and rock history are the same energy at different points in time.

Green Day's third album, Dookie, released February 1, 1994 on Reprise Records, got the band banned from 924 Gilman Street and sold twenty million copies in the United States. Produced by Rob Cavallo and the band at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, it generated four charting singles and a Woodstock '94 set that became the stuff of legend. The tension between where the band came from and where Dookie took them is still the most interesting thing about it.

Mark Trombino co-produced the records that built emo's mainstream moment, including Blink-182's "Dude Ranch," Jimmy Eat World's "Clarity" and "Bleed American," and Finch's "What It Is to Burn," yet his name rarely appears in the genre's oral history. This is the case for the man who made the scene sound like itself.

In the autumn of 1976, Tom Verlaine walked into A&R Recording in New York and rejected Andy Johns's big drum sound on the first day of sessions. That decision shaped everything about "Marquee Moon," Television's debut, released February 8, 1977. Co-produced by Verlaine and Johns, recorded live with almost no effects, the album remains one of the most precisely realized records to come out of the New York punk scene.

Taking Back Sunday and Fall Out Boy launched within a year of each other in 2001-2002, built on the same hardcore-to-emo pipeline, and spent the decade in an explicit creative dialogue that Fall Out Boy literally named a song after. Their parallel debuts reveal two different solutions to the same problem, and the conversation between them shaped a generation of pop-punk.

Brand New recorded Deja Entendu at Reflection Sound Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina in February 2003, with producer Steven Haigler. Released June 17, 2003, the album marked a sharp departure from their pop-punk debut, charted at number 63 in the US, went Gold, and produced two UK top-40 singles.

"Anarchy in the U.K.," released November 26, 1976, is punk's founding document and its most carefully constructed production. Recorded at Wessex Sound Studios by producer Chris Thomas and engineer Bill Price, the track used all 24 available tracks, with Steve Jones overdubbing a wall of orchestrated guitar that the song's raw reputation has always obscured.

My Chemical Romance recorded “The Black Parade” from April to August 2006 at the Paramour Mansion in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, a location the band believed bled its unease directly into the music. Produced alongside Rob Cavallo, the album was conceived as the band’s final record, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, and spawned a UK No. 1 single in “Welcome to the Black Parade.” The tension between self-destruction and defiance is what gives it its extraordinary charge.

Mark Trombino, the Drive Like Jehu drummer turned producer, built the sonic template that made emo's mainstream crossover possible, engineering Jimmy Eat World's Clarity and Bleed American, Blink-182's Dude Ranch, and Finch's What It Is to Burn before the scene moved on without him.