Nowadays, finding new music is as easy as launching Spotify to see what the algorithm has in store for you. Back in the day, however, you needed to spend hours perusing record shop bins and talking to snooty employees. But there was a brief in-between time where MP3 blogs were a chief gateway to finding new music, where editors and bloggers hand-curated MP3s from indie labels and underground artists.

Chief among these — for me and my friends, anyway — was Epitonic, arguably the first MP3 site devoted to indie bands and labels. Which helped us discover the likes of Black Heart Procession, The Dismemberment Plan, Patrick Phelan, and Spokane (to name but a few). Indeed, I’m pretty sure that I have a CD or two filled with MP3s that I downloaded from the site. But chief among my discoveries on Epitonic was the New York quintet Antarctica, and their towering 81:03 double CD.

Listening to it now, after so many years, I can only imagine the band conversations. Were they going to make a shoegaze album? A goth-y post-punk album? An emo album? A techno album? An ambient album? As it turns out, they opted for “All of the above.” 81:03 takes all of those genres and finds the unlikely connections between them, meaning that pining emo vocals can be heard right alongside shimmering guitar melodies, moodily futuristic synthscapes, and four-on-the-floor beats — and they all flow together seamlessly.

I actually got a chance to see Antarctica on tour less than two months after 81:03’s release. They were opening for The Gloria Record at Lincoln’s long-defunct Knickerbockers, though to be honest, I remember nothing of the headliner’s set. Truth be told, I think I left halfway through The Gloria Record’s performance. The moment Antarctica started playing songs like “Absence,” “The Chrome Selected,” and “Tektur the Water” from behind their array of effects pedals and synthesizers, I completely forgot that any other bands were on the bill.