Tuscadero’s another one of those teenybopper twee-punk bands that sounds like they just came out of high school. There really isn’t anything to explain why Elektra signed them in 1996 after a short stint on Teenbeat, who released the first version of The Pink Album, except that out of the band’s simple formula grew a formidable ability to write a good hook or five. It’s probably the only reason so many people (relatively speaking, of course) have “Nancy Drew” in their MP3 collections, even if they don’t know anything else about Tuscadero. Really, “Nancy Drew” is like a highly addictive drug made up of Nancy Drew books and model horses from Massachusetts.

If you care to look deeper into Tuscadero’s early days, though, you’ll not only find the rough original cut of “Nancy Drew”—which you may or may not like more than the glossy Elektra version—but a lot of other lost gems just as fine as “Nancy Drew.” And if you’ve never heard anything from Tuscadero, you might be surprised at how quickly their cute pre-Donnas pop-punk gets into your head. What else would you expect from a band that took its name from a rock singer on Happy Days, to which “Leather Idol” pays tribute?