I spent some time with Zach De La Rocha once. This was pretty recently, and in a strictly non-work capacity. We’ve got a mutual friend, and we happened to be in the same place at the same time. It took a minute to even register the reality that I was sitting there talking to a guy I’d idolized decades ago. There are famous people who will always carry themselves like famous people, long after their fame fades. That’s not De La Rocha. He’s warm and generous — quiet, but in a friendly way. Once he warms up, he tells some truly mind-boggling stories. When he talked about his past, it was with a sort of shaken disbelief — as if his run as the world’s most important rock star was a traumatic period that he was still trying to wrap his head around. He seemed like he doesn’t get out that much. I really liked him, and I got the sense that I’d like him just the same if he was just some random guy I’d met at a party, if he’d worked at a bank or a gas station. He was emphatically not the person who commands all the attention when he walks into a room. But not that long ago, this guy was our greatest hope in a post-Cobain universe, a fire-eyed presence who seemed ready to take on the world.

Rage Against The Machine were dangerous. We forget about that now. To the extent that people remember them now, I get a sense that it’s with a sort of detached amusement, or maybe with a sense of loss. And sure, maybe it’s funny — in a sad sort of way — that this band of politically charged firebrands were leading future frat boys in chants of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” — their urgent rhetorical shotgun blasts reduced to the sort of things you drunkenly yell at cops when your college house party gets shut down. And sure, it’s depressing that this band unwittingly presaged the rap-metal explosion that would erase so much of the promise that they once represented. Still, Rage were something that happened. Hundreds of thousands of suburban kids were walking around in Che Guevara T-shirts, forcing uncomfortable dinner-table conversations. Anarchist-bookstore slogans were going into heavy rotation on AOR rock stations. Small-town teenage Republicans were having their entire worldviews reshaped. (I know some of these guys now. They’re real.) All of these things can be directly tied to Rage Against The Machine, to the furious and vital music that they were making in the ’90s.

The band’s definitive document will always be its self-titled debut album, an album that still makes me feel like I can juggle Volkswagen Passats when I play it today. And I think part of the reason that album still resonates is that it’s the one album they made with almost nothing at stake. De La Rocha was only a couple of years removed from fronting a Revelation Records hardcore band. Tom Morello was only a couple of years removed from playing in a glammy funk-metal band. Rage had a major-label contract, but so did half the alt-rock bands on the face of the planet. I can’t imagine anyone’s expectations for the self-titled album were sky-high. Maybe their A&R thought he’d found another Urban Dance Squad or Downset or something. On the Lollapalooza ’93 tour, Rage opened the main stage; even, like, Front 242 got higher billing. So they were able to knock out a record like that without feeling the weight of the world crushing them.

That wasn’t the case with their sophomore album Evil Empire, which celebrates its 20th anniversary tomorrow. Evil Empire was the first album Rage made as stars, as the kind of band who could pack an amphitheater on their own. (Evil Empire would prove to be the album that moved them from amphitheaters to arenas.) It was the first time they made something new while in the public eye. For many artists, that’s a chance to step the fuck up, to show what you’re made of. And maybe it was that for Rage, too. But it also must’ve been a massive burden for them. After all, this was a band that wore its politics on its sleeve, and they’d just become arguably one of America’s most visible leftist organizations. They’d also begun to see the effect that their dinosaur-stomp rap-metal fusion would have on the world. Korn and the Deftones both released their debut albums in the years after that self-titled Rage album, and while it’s hard to say how much Rage influenced those two bands, it’s certainly safe to say that Rage gave them a path to success. Point being: Evil Empire was an album that was always going to face scrutiny.

Rage responded to that scrutiny in an eminently sane way. They went deeper. De La Rocha rapped about Mexican farm rebellions, the type of things that you would not otherwise hear about if you were a suburban teenage kid in the 1990s. He also gave himself more room to rap. He rarely chants on Evil Empire, the way he’d done on the previous album. And where his repeated hooks on the self-titled LP were no-brainer chant-alongs, the type of things that you could grasp the second you heard them, the lyrics on Evil Empire forced you to slow down and think for a second. “As I’m rolling down Rodeo with the shotgun / These people haven’t seen a brown-skinned man since they grandparents bought one” — that’s a line with a lot of weight to it, and not something an arena full of kids will immediately yell back at you. The rest of the band, too, tapped into a deeper and heavier groove. Most of the tracks on Evil Empire don’t seize your attention the way their first-album counterparts did. Instead, they’re thick, almost atmospheric head-nodders.

But all that said, we may never again hear a rock album that sounds this huge and physical. It just doesn’t happen anymore. Metal is in a different place now, and it’s not producing albums like this, albums that just roll. And Evil Empire also had “Bulls On Parade.” To kids in my generation, “Bulls On Parade” probably sounded something like how “Kashmir” sounded to kids a couple of generations earlier. It was a song that, the first time you heard it, felt like it had always existed, like it had been carved into an Egyptian tablet somewhere. Has any two-note guitar riff ever kicked the world in the gut like that? Has anyone ever come up with an opaque phrase as evocative as “five-sided fistagon”? (I wonder if De La Rocha knew he was making the military-industrial complex sound cool when he described it like that.) Morello’s imitation-DJ-scratch guitar solo was both formally innovative and absolutely of its moment. It’s hard to imagine a rock guitarist in 2016 using her instrument to replicate, say, Metro Boomin’s bass tone, but that’s what Morello’s solo was like in 1996.

Evil Empire hasn’t held up the way the band’s debut did, even if it does still swing hard. But it was the album that the band needed to make in that moment. Facing public scrutiny and federal government harassment — I’ve heard stories — the band turned the fireball excitement of its first album into something sustainable. They became an arena-rock band without watering down their sound or, more importantly, their point of view. They had already been a sensation. With Evil Empire, they became a force. Imagine if more bands had taken their determination, their fire, as an example, rather than just landing on the brutal fist-pump power of their combination of sounds. Imagine how the world might look if we had more bands like Rage — if they hadn’t turned out to be some glorious fluke.