Although seemingly lying dormant for most of the past couple of decades, Amphetamine Reptile Records—the Minneapolis-based label known in the ‘90s for a particularly caustic brand of rock noise—has quietly resumed operations on a modest level. AmRep’s Tom Hazelmyer has been repressing the label’s back catalog in limited numbers on colored vinyl housed in screenprinted sleeves while partnering with MVD, who issued the AmRep documentary, The Color of Noise, on Blu-ray/DVD, for greater quantities on standard issue vinyl and CDs. With many AmRep titles long of out of print, these represses are a godsend, especially if you’ve ever used the term “pigfuck” with affection.

Among AmRep’s notable releases, the Dope, Guns ’n‘ Fucking in the Streets series of 7-inch comps featured cuts from both on and off the label’s roster packaged in sleeves bearing a distinctive iconography. (As he relates in the liner notes, Hazelmyer told the designer to make the first one look “like a Foetus album.”) While those EPs were previously compiled on CD (typically three or volumes on one CD), AmRep kicked off the reissue series this year by compiling volumes 1 to 11 (nearly all of them) on a double-disc set.

For anyone needing their earholes cleaned out, I can think of no better way than with this compilation. It’s a two-hour-plus survey of some of the most gnarly sounds of the times, with superb tracks by AmRep staples like Cows, Surgery, Helmet, Hammerhead, and Gaunt. But some of the best stuff comes in the form of seldom hear cuts by such off-label notables as Boss Hog, whose “Red Bath” is like a female-fronted reinvisioning of Big Black, Superchunk, who sound tougher than they ever did heretofore and afterwards on “Basement Life,” and the Boredoms, who come off typically demented on “Pukori.” It’s like a sonic panacea for all that ails you.

Of all the bands to release records under the Amphetamine Reptile banner, there is perhaps none more sorely under-recognized than the Cows. Theirs was an idiosyncratic kind of dementia. They took a similarly noisy aesthetic as their AmRep brethren and warped it with black humor and frontman Shannon Selberg’s bleating horns. It certainly wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, too potent for all but the most open-minded of ears.

The band’s second album, but first for AmRep, Daddy Has a Tail, is a record dense with guitar debris, a thorny thicket of an album that requires a degree of patience for it to reveal itself. Here, the Cows hadn’t quite reached the genius level of later records, but they are definitely on the cusp. Each bit of guitar, bass, and drums grinds against one another, seemingly only existing in relation to the whole. As such, on tracks like “Camouflage Monkey” and “Chow,” the Cows lurch and careen as one. This is the first time this album has been issued on CD.

Cunning Stunts, the band’s fifth record, may be the Cows’ defining moment. Originally released in 1992, the album reveals the Cows to have found their identity, with each element now honed and able to hold its own. Most importantly, it is here that Selberg found his voice, his vocals now more distinctive as they trail off into wavering tendrils. Similarly, his horn blowing adds another element to separate the band from others operating in the noise rock trenches, well-populated then in the post-grunge explosion era. From “Heave Ho” onward, the Cows lay down an unequaled delirium.

Like the bands it represented, Amphetamine Reptile pedaled music as a form of hedonism, an escape from the mundanity of everyday life to something extreme. It was those extremes—whether puerile, debauched, or just sonically intense—that defined the label. And for that reason alone, we should all be grateful for its existence, in whatever form.