When an album breaks a band you love, it gets saddled with a lot of baggage. Most albums are just a chapter in a band’s existence; there were albums before and there will be albums after. But the elephant in the room that music fans like to ignore is that there will always, eventually, be a last album, and a lot of “last albums” aren’t conceived or built to serve that role. When careers cut short because of death, or petty disagreements, or a simple exhaustion of ideas, it’s not usually the poetic ride-off-into-the-sunset conclusion we’d hope for. And yet, despite the randomness that often plays into the endings of musical careers, us music fans obsess over the lore and mythology of our favorite artists so much that we end up conferring significance that isn’t there on albums that just so happen to come at the end of the story.

Such was the case, for years, with Get Hurt, the fifth LP from New Jersey rock band The Gaslight Anthem. Released in August 2014, Get Hurt had the distinction for nearly a decade of being the final album that The Gaslight Anthem ever made. And for me at least, it collected all the baggage, lore, and extra fascination such a distinction entails. A part of me hated the album for breaking up a band I loved, for wasting the boundless potential I’d heard in their music just two years earlier. Another part of me loved it for the mystique of it all – the question of what it was about this particular set of songs that drove these four guys to the brink and forced them to pull the ripcord. To this day, when I listen to Get Hurt, those two parts of me are still in the room together, coexisting – even though, now, the album has been freed from most of the weight it was once tasked with carrying.

Brian Fallon didn’t NEED to make Elsie. By the time this album arrived – the one and only record Fallon made with the side project he dubbed The Horrible Crowes – Fallon was already well on his way to rock star status…or, at least, it seemed that way at the time. His full-time band, The Gaslight Anthem, had released three albums and an EP in the space of three years and about two weeks – a remarkable run that saw the band gaining ground with each release. By the time Elsie arrived in September 2011, there was already buzz brewing about Gaslight Anthem LP4, and about how that album had the potential to launch Fallon and company into a whole new stratosphere. Just about anyone else would have taken a well-deserved break. Based on the exhaustion that would eventually crash The Gaslight Anthem, maybe Fallon should have. Instead, he teamed up with his guitar tech, Ian Perkins, and made one of the great left-turn albums in 21st century rock ‘n’ roll. Some days, I think it might just be his masterpiece.