When Elektra Records picked up the Marvelous 3 and released Hey! Album as a major label debut in 1998, they thought they were signing a hit act. After all, the flagship single from that album, the mercilessly hooky “Freak of the Week,” had done quite well for itself as an independent release, notching near-ubiquitous airplay on the band’s local Atlanta radio stations and earning the Butch Walker-fronted power-pop-rock trio a passionate fanbase. But the wider mainstream audience wasn’t really ready for the catchy, idiosyncratic sound of Marvelous 3, which blended biting sarcasm, bitter lyrics about failed relationships, and easy-to-swallow melodies together into a unique concoction. Instead, the radio was turning toward boy bands and rap metal, and as “Freak of the Week” failed to score a high chart position, Elektra realized that they had signed anything but a hit pop act; they had signed a band that, in that age of pop music, wasn’t marketable to the average radio audience. At all.

In the first installment of Butch Walker Week, I wrote that Math and Other Problems, the debut album from Walker’s 1990s power pop trio, the Marvelous 3, felt like a half-formed statement from a band that was still very indebted to their influences. On Hey! Album, the group’s sophomore-record-turned-major-label-debut, the leap forward is almost remarkable. Don’t get me wrong, Walker and company don’t try that many new things here: it’s still a slick, catchy album full of punchy power pop songs and with a foot planted firmly in 1980s alternative rock. But instead of spending the whole record imitating his influences, Walker establishes himself here as full-throated rock ‘n’ roll frontman, with the charisma, the passion, and the songwriting ability to go the whole nine yards. Naturally, his band follows suit.

In the years that followed the dissolution of the Marvelous 3, a 1990s one-hit wonder power-pop trio fronted by Butch Walker, Butch would often remark that his band was “15 years too late and five years too early.” After all, Walker and his bandmates—bassist Jayce Fincher and a drummer who was only ever known as “Slug” in the album liner notes (his real name is Doug Mitchell)—didn’t really fit in with the broody nineties crowd. There’s not a single iota of grunge in any of the three records Walker and the rest of the Marvelous 3 ever produced, nor is there anything akin to the boy-band/pop-princess radio fodder that was poised to take over the world as the decade and the millennium ground to a close. Instead, the guys in the Marvelous 3 were disciples of eighties hair metal and trashy pop-rock songs, with a fair amount of classic glam and singer/songwriter mentality thrown in for good measure. Those influences probably meant the band was straight fucked from the moment they signed with Elektra Records, a label that became known for screwing over similarly-minded pop-rock acts (Third Eye Blind and Nada Surf, for example) before they ran out of money and went bust in the face of the Napster revolution. But for a few years at least, the Marvelous 3 got to act like rock stars, and in the process, they produced three of the finest power pop records of the past 20 years. 1997’s Math and Other Problems was the first.