Of course, Merchandise are hardly the first punk-schooled band to eventually pursue loftier aspirations. There were, like, 70 fucking people.” Fast forward two years, and that same guy has just released an album that sounds like it was designed for stadium crowds of 70,000.

There were a ton of fucking people there. To wit, in a July 2012 interview with Pitchfork, Carson Cox of Tampa post-punk outfit Merchandise offered up this definition of success: “There’s a new warehouse space called Cyborg City, where we just played an amazing show.

We tend to measure the speed of 21st-century living by the furious rate of cultural output, but an even more accurate gauge is how quickly once-entrenched ideals can change.