In the mid-’90s, when I was in high school, the German label Crypt Records had cornered the market on the sleazy, knuckedragging, oilstained-bowling-shirt garage rock that was all over the American indie underground at the time. Its roster teemed with hair-slicked, hormone-addled hammerheads: the New Bomb Turks, the Devil Dogs, the Gories, the Lyres, Nine Pound Hammer, the early Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the mighty Japanese Teengenerate, the mightier British Thee Mighty Caesars. And in 1995, the label rounded up songs from all those bands for Cheapo Crypt Sampler, a 32-track CD compilation that retailed for somewhere between $5 and $8. I haven’t listened to Cheapo Crypt Sampler in well over a decade, and I have no idea how it’s aged. But listening to it as a kid, it blew my mind how many people from across the world were happy to bash out jaggedly horny two-chord sneer-anthems. Despite the genre’s early-’00s moment in the MTV2 sun, the entire garage rock infrastructure is probably stronger now than it’s been since Crypt was running things. And now get the 15-track Garage Swim. Its songs are cleaner and warmer and more varied than what was on Cheapo Crypt Sampler, but it’s animated by the same drunken revivalist spirit. And it’s even cheaper than Cheapo Crypt Sampler. It’s free.

I realize I’m stretching the definition of “mixtape” beyond all recognition by including Garage Swim here. But it’s a free online album, and when I started this column, I told myself I’d be open to including free online albums from any genre. And given its Adult Swim-curated, corporate-sponsored genesis, it’s probably just as far-fetched to compare it to Cheapo Crypt Sampler, which documented a bunch of no-budget no-hopers who had basically no commercial prospects unless they were willing to shout their band’s name 15 times per song. (Blues Explosion!) These days, even the most small-time of the Garage Swim bands can sound relatively bigtime even if they’re recording on their laptops, as a few of them probably are. But the Adult Swim people put this thing together well, grabbing from different aesthetic realms loosely united into a global scene and generally making a convincing argument that this rearview-dice music is in a very, very good place right now.

Compilations have always been great for garage rock, a genre best consumed in three-minute bursts of inspiration anyway. The best garage album ever isn’t an album at all; it’s Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation, which haphazardly yanked the greatest moments from the bands who’d come up in the post-Stones wave, a wave that had really only just ended when Kaye put it together. Those bands came upon punk rock almost by accident, by failing to be Beatles or Stones but coming up with something vital and immediate anyway. And since then, every wave of garage rock has been proudly retro, and almost as proudly single-driven. In a compilation like this, bands only have one shot to grab your ear before disappearing. At album length, a band like the Black Lips can devolve into hyuck-hyuck schtick, and even the great Thee Oh Sees are sometimes given to wig-out pretension. But when they show up here, they’re in prime form, fast and strong, charging through hooks with purpose and direction and cutting themselves off before the three-minute mark.

Garage Swim is also a sonically richer and more varied experience than it has to be. It’s got halfway-to-Sabbath stoner-doom from JEFF The Brotherhood, churning surf-rock from King Khan with the Gris Gris, a six-minute psych-guitar wigout from Weekend that vaguely reminds me of early U2. King Tuff and Gap Dream’s “She’s On Fire” has icy electro bloops that move it beyond the already-great bratty glam stomp that Tuff always brings. Mikal Cronin’s “Better Man,” meanwhile is lovely and sensitive bah-bah-bah power-pop with a Stax soul horn section, and it somehow leads directly into Mind Spiders’ animalistic headlong attack. But despite all the relative diversity, when Crypt veterans the Gories show up with a two-minute rave-up, they fit right in. Garage Swim is as inconsistent as any compilation, and maybe it won’t endure a decade from now. But it gives curious parties a very good idea that exciting things are happening within its field, and that means it does its job. Fun driving album, too.

Download Garage Swim for free here.