Before the Flaming Lips transformed into well-heeled art rockers frolicking at the VMAs, palling around with Miley Cyrus and floating over Bonnaroo in a giant hamster bubble, they spent years as a grungy and often broke noise-rock group from Oklahoma. Twenty-five years ago today, the band released the screeching, Jesus-obsessed psych-pop masterpiece In a Priest Driven Ambulance, setting in motion events that would change their circumstances forever.

In the wake of Cyrus’s full-length Lips collab, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, there's a new generation stumbling upon the Lips’ illustrious back catalog. In a Priest Driven Ambulance (With Silver Sunshine Stares)—that's the seldom used full title—has little in common withDead Petz or last year's tepid Sgt. Pepper's cover album. It's noisy and urgent and the last record the Lips made for a minor label, the last time they worked free of external pressures or expectations. Aside from devoted fans, it's a largely forgotten masterpiece. Here are 10 reasons Ambulance is worth remembering.

It Landed The Band A Major Label Deal

In a parallel universe, the Lips are still making noise in hopeless obscurity in some basement in Oklahoma City. Instead, they’ve enjoyed 25 years of Warner Bros. backing after becoming one of the most unlikely major-label signings in a decade filled with unlikely major-label signings. That came about after A&R person Roberta Petersen heard In a Priest Driven Ambulance and caught the band at a dangerously pyrotechnics-heavy gig. (Fun trivia: When Warner Bros. first called the Lips in 1990, the band hung up, thinking they were being scolded for having prank-called the label in the past.)

Jonathan “Dingus” Donahue

The guitarist has spent many more years at the helm of his own psych-rock band, Mercury Rev, so it's easy to forget that he was a Lips member from 1989 through 1991, or that he transformed the group's sound immensely (along with dummer Nathan Roberts) for the better. Before Donahue, the Lips played a lovably amateurish sort of garage-rock stomp that took Richard English’s endearingly sloppy drum fills and Wayne Coyne’s highly limited rhythm guitar about as far as they could go. Donahue joined at a Lips low point—the group was dead broke and without a drummer after releasing the spotty Telepathic Surgery in ‘89—and the resulting two-guitar assault gives Ambulance a fuller and freakier sheen than the band's '80s records. It was the guitarist's cassette deck and his vision that musicians “could all be our own George Martins” that set the writing of Ambulanceinto motion. Donahue's love of effects pedals gave tracks like “God Walks Among Us Now” a terrifying, warped edge and predicted Ronald Jones’ entry into the band. On “Five Stop Mother Superior Rain,” Donahue lets the excessive feedback wash over one of Coyne’s strongest melodies, while another noise-damaged rocker, “Unconsciously Screamin’,” supposedly took 200 mixes to get the guitarist’s sounds right.

Every Song Is 3:26 Long

Not really (in fact, two songs stretch past the six-minute mark). But for some inexplicable reason, the band played a joke on fans and listed each song as three minutes and 26 seconds. More bizarre sequencing gags would follow—the follow-up, Hit to Death in the Future Head, concludes with 29 minutes of static noise.

It Established The Lips’ Obsession With Religion

Priest Driven Ambulance, a loose concept album revolving around an obsession with religion, the Lips show it’s possible for a rock band to sing about Christianity without being a Christian rock band. “Jesus was just part of the imagery that we used,” Coyne told DeRogatis. Hence, subtitles like “Jesus Song No.1” or “Jesus Song No. 2”  and lyrics like “Waiting for my ride / Jesus is waiting outside.” Fittingly, a psychedelic video for “Unconsciously Screamin’” was filmed at a biblical theme park in Connecticut. Later, the Lips would obsess over Christmas (“Christmas at the Zoo,” Christmas on Mars) and cover songs like “Plastic Jesus” and “White Christmas.”

Plagiarism!

It seems quaint in the era of “Blurred Lines,” but the Lips’ loose, affectionate attitude towards plagiarism can be summed up as: There’s nothing wrong with borrowing elements from your idols if you ‘fess to it. Hence, the space-groove “Take Meta Mars” bears a striking similarity to CAN’s “Mushroom Head” (reportedly, it began as an attempt to cover the CAN song after having only heard it once) while “Rainin’ Babies” is reminiscent of a Juice Newton melody. Later, the Lips would nab a killer Pink Floyd drum intro for “Pilot Can at the Queer of God” and get in trouble for using a Cat Stevens melody on 2003’s “Fight Test.”

It’s The First Truly Great Lips Album

Ambulance may not be the Lips’ greatest album, but it stands as the group’s first truly great statement, their Rubber Soul or Paul’s Boutique—the Big Leap Forward. It opened the door to the label-funded excess of 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head and the guitar-heavy noise-pop grandeur of 1993’s Transmissions From the Satellite Heart and 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic. With “Rainin’ Babies” and “Five Stop Mother Superior Rain,” it established Coyne’s knack for earnest balladry, giving him the confidence to write songs like Hit to Death’s majestic “You Have To Be Joking”and, later, “Do You Realize??” And Ambulance partly predicted the freakier sonic terrain of 1997’s four-CD experiment Zaireeka, as well as the studio-as-instrument techniques employed on 1999 masterpiece The Soft Bulletin.

It Set Off One Of The Best Winning Streaks In Rock History

That statement probably seems hyperbolic, though with the benefit of time I no longer think that it is. The Flaming Lips’ 1990–1999 output, which includes the six studio albums named above, belongs up there in consideration with Prince’s Dirty Mind/Controversy/1999/Purple Rain run and the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet/Let It Bleed/Sticky Fingers/Exile on Main St marathon. (In fact, it’s easy to forget that the Lips’ output was remarkably consistent until pretty recently—I’ll submit At War with the Mystics as the only less-than-great album of original material the band produced between 1990 and 2010.)

It Began The Lips’ Partnership With Producer Dave Fridmann

Fridmann is to the Flaming Lips as George Martin was to the Beatles. He has produced, or co-produced, just about everything the band has done since 1990, barring Transmissions From the Satellite Heart. This creative partnership began with In a Priest Driven Ambulance. The story, as Jim DeRogatis recounts in Staring at Sound, is that Donahue suggested then 21-year-old Fridmann because he worked at the State University of New York in Fredonia and “can get us cheap studio time.” (The deal Fridmann offered, per that book: “[The Lips] could record at the college studio for five dollars an hour at a time when similar facilities charged twenty times more.”) Fridmann gave the Lips the time and multitracked technical know-how to pursue the studio tricks they’d always dreamt of. And he was willing to get weird. For the delicate “There You Are,” for instance, Fridmann agreed to record tracks outside in the middle of the night, hauling a digital recorder and mixing board out to a freeway during an eclipse.

“(What A) Wonderful World”

It’s one of the band’s best covers, and it coats the darkness with an endearing glimmer of optimism. As Coyne recounts in the Day They Shot a Hole in the Jesus Egg liner notes, the group at first intended the cover as a sarcastic gag. They were barely even kidding themselves.

Because No One Else Seems To Remember It

Except the diehards. On a Lips fan forum that was active in the mid-2000s, it was the longest-serving fans who’d praise Ambulance, people who recalled stumbling across the “Unconsciously Screamin’” video at 4:00 am or seeing the Lips nearly burn down American Legion Hall in 1990. In more recent years, the album has been curiously left behind as other Lips records have gotten the canonization treatment: a 33 1/3 for Zaireeka, a Pitchfork.tv documentary for The Soft Bulletin, some twentieth anniversary shows performing Clouds Taste Metallic. So carry the flag for Ambulance. Dust it off (or discover it anew) tonight.