At least not from 1995 to 2003, when the noisy shoegaze trio was active in and around the college town of Fredericksburg.

Made up of Oliver Ackermann, Paul Baker and John Fedowitz — friends from Stafford Senior High School — Skywave sounded like The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. At the time, Baker says, that’s not what locals wanted to hear.

Skywave (via Facebook)

“These days, the hipsters would maybe like us, but in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I felt like we seemed we were from another planet,” emails Baker, 38, who still lives in Fredericksburg.

But 12 years after Skywave went quiet, a fan in São Paolo, Brazil, is giving the band a belated tip of the hat. On June 20, Renato Malizia plans to release a free digital compilation called Got That Feeling: A Tribute to Skywave via his label and website, The Blog That Celebrates Itself.

“I’ve always been a big fan of Skywave from the start,” Malizia writes in an email. He says a friend who understood his taste — he counts the Valentines and Jesus and Mary Chain among his favorite bands — hipped him to Skywave’s 1999 record, Echodrone, after a trip to the U.S. It was “love at first hearing,” Malizia writes.

“We were playing songs with actual melodies and we looked like some skinny wimps, but we were louder and weren’t following some awful, flavor-of-the-month sound.” —Paul Baker, formerly of Skywave

When ex-Skywave members moved on to other bands — Ackermann relocated to Brooklyn and formed A Place to Bury Strangers and Fedowitz and Baker played in Ceremony until Baker left in 2012, starting Static Daydream — Malizia stayed hot on their trail.

In March, Malizia and Baker began chatting on Facebook about a Skywave tribute. The blogger contacted bands from all over the world with personal or stylistic ties to Skywave and commissioned 19 covers for the compilation. Oregon’s The Prids, Brazil’s Lautmusik, England’s Nothing.Existed and Virginia’s Screen Vinyl Image — in addition to A Place To Bury Strangers and Static Daydream — are among the bands chipping in.

In 2003, after years of playing to unappreciative audiences, that level of Skywave fandom seemed unimaginable, Baker writes.

“Sometimes … we’d play at some hipster place and they’d seem to hate us as much as the country or Top 40 sort of venues, because what we were doing wasn’t considered cool at the time,” Baker writes. “We’d play with hardcore, screamo bands, and I think we just blew them away and they didn’t know how to respond. I mean, we were playing songs with actual melodies and we looked like some skinny wimps, but we were louder and weren’t following some awful, flavor-of-the-month sound.”

Malizia says that’s exactly what he loved about Skywave.

“Skywave rescues on their albums that magic, that energy, that dream of making real music without using the marketing or the media,” the blogger writes. He admires that the group seemed to “say ‘f**k you’ to everyone.”

Or maybe it’s that Skywave — with its sound cribbed from the 1980s and early ’90s — was both behind and ahead of its time.

“Back then it seemed like we were playing shows for about five of our friends, which was cool, but it certainly didn’t feel like 10 or 15 years later anybody would remember or care enough to do some kind of tribute. So that’s a pretty amazing feeling,” Baker writes. “I mean, we were trying to do something great back then, but it never really felt like it was happening.”

The Blog That Celebrates Itself plans to release Got That Feeling: A Tribute To Skywave on June 20.

Below, a playlist of highlights from Skywave’s Echodrone and Synthstatic LPs:

Buried under the dissonance and reverb-infused noise of Transfixiation, APTBS’s latest album, are some familiar and strangely comforting goth and new-wave signposts. In a mind-altering recent studio set, the Brooklyn trio unearthed those dark melodies, only to send them blazing into the stratosphere.

SET LIST

• “Now It’s Over”

Watch A Place To Bury Strangers’ full performance on KEXP’s YouTube channel.

Copyright 2015 KEXP-FM. To see more, visit http://www.kexp.org/.

Singer-guitarist Oliver Ackermann has been the group’s frontman and sole remaining original member during its 12-year existence, and he’s maintained a singularity of style and substance, all of it thickly blackened. But Transfixiation‘s jagged edges aren’t quite as blurry as those of its predecessors, and there’s a new-found tightness in the attack that’s as refreshing as it is menacing.

With APTBS’ primary and overwhelming influence, The Jesus And Mary Chain, staging a 30th-anniversary tour this year for its groundbreaking debut Psychocandy, it’s more important than ever that the band stretch into its own sound. Luckily, it has. Much of that has to do with new drummer Robi Gonzalez. Transfixiation is his recorded debut with APTBS, and he spiritedly strays from the band’s previously established J&MC-esque beats. It’s a less tribal sort of pounding, and while the caveman rhythms of old are missed, Gonzalez replaces them with everything from the sleek, feral, industrial clattering in “We’ve Come So Far” to the frantic blues-rock windmilling in the climactic album-closer “I Will Die.” As far as song titles go, it’s perfect — and APTBS lives up to that fatalism with a meltdown of timeless proportions, sounding like The Yardbirds as fed through a blast furnace.

A more restrained desperation fuels “Supermaster,” a study in shadowy alienation — that you can dance to — injected with Ackermann’s strangled, splintered guitar solo. “If you f— with me, you’re gonna burn,” he whispers like a serial killer in the sludgy, squealing “Deeper.” It’s a testament to his degenerate charisma that he makes his nerve-shredding threat seem like an irresistible come-on.

“I’m So Clean,” with its lunging punk simplicity and feedback-smeared snarl, is as close to vintage APTBS as Transfixiation gets. But that tried-and-true approach has been rewired and rebooted, giving the album more breadth. As for depth, the group has never needed it; this is all doomed romanticism, animal lust and revenge, a bloodshot vision of indie rock that leaves all the quirk and niceness quivering in a heap on the floor. There is, however, an urge here to forge a primal kind of art-rock, one that’s more about texture than structure. And it succeeds.

Dark, destructive and dreamy, Transfixiation is the sound of APTBS turning its demolitionist tactics on itself. The result is fractured yet oddly cohesive — and more than any other entry in the band’s catalog, it oozes legit mystique. “You wanna fill the void?” Ackermann leers in the Suicide-meets-Spacemen 3 death-drone of “Fill The Void.” The thing is, he’s already done it.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.