Getting in was as hard as getting out is going to be. Now the terror of navigating ten floors and finding new friends is as easy to relive as the fear of yesterday's calculus test or seeing your designated assassin waiting for you outside the classroom. The jump from Freshman Friday to Killer hints at the four distinct worlds that rest between the four walls at 345 Chambers Street. They may coexist relatively smoothly, but each is easily distinguished. The experience of each grade is embodied in a quintessential album. Although not all four recordings that chronicle our high school career were released during it, they were chosen according to content to match emotion, pecking order in the artist's discography, and of course quality. So sit back, pop them into the stereo, and let the good/bad/ok times roll--again.

Freshman
Flashback to freshman year. From the stomach-turning transition from junior high to high school to the rebellion of full-fledged teenagerdom, ninth grade refused to pass without a fight. Just like the first year of high school, the Get Up Kids' debut album Four Minute Mile bursts with energy and emotion. Its eleven songs of blasted love may be more than the average 14-year-old can relate to. But the full-throttle punk rawness combined with heart-on-sleeve lyrics of holding on and letting go will get anyone's heart pumping and/or breaking, as the case may be.

For all its extroverted energy, the album's loud sound shelters the wounds of singer Matthew Pryor, whose voice and lyrics play the part of a Freshman Friday victim. The album launches with "Coming Clean," a short but sharp blitz of angular guitars in the heat of the moment, but soon steps away from the center of the emotional turmoil as it progresses. For most of its duration, Four Minute Mile packs the power of an upperclassman's fist, broken only by the more restrained "Lowercase West Thomas" before hurtling back to the tantrum of "Washington Square Park."

At just under 35 minutes, it's short but not so sweet. Incredibly catchy riffs push unrestrained emotions to new heights, but before you know it, it's over and there's nothing quite like it again--the Get Up Kids moved onto more subdued releases, and sophomore year is a huge step in maturity away from freshman year. As Pryor sings in "Shorty," "the last time I saw you act like this, we were kids." So were we all.

Sophomore
The "middle child" of the high school years, sophomore year is outwardly calm and is therefore the often overlooked and relatively anticlimactic one of the four. After the novelty of getting into Stuy wears off, what do you do? You could be like Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo and hunker down in academia for years (sound familiar?) until you come out with a masterpiece like Pinkerton--only to have it tank into relative obscurity. After the runaway success of their debut album, Weezer traded in their geeky power pop for the darker rock of Pinkerton, but like the relatives who were sick of hearing about your Stuy acceptance, fair-weather fans stopped caring.

That's a shame considering what pains it must have taken Cuomo, a professional wallflower and all-around shy guy, to expose this much of himself to the public. Though it manages to keep its composure from start to finish, ripples of unrest reverberate underneath Pinkerton's sing-along pop melodies and bitingly smart lyrics. Beneath its obvious pop sensibilities lies the angst of sexual frustration and restlessness that any highschooler can relate to. Unlike his peers, the noisier Get Up Kids, the older and perhaps wiser Cuomo never completely loses it at any point, even though you know he's dying to. He almost does in "Across the Sea," when the veneer of painfully funny self-deprecation cracks and his voice rises in a quavering crescendo in "as if I could live on words and dreams and a million screams, oh how I need a hand near mine to feel." But geeky tendencies aside, er, included, Pinkerton parallels the sophomore experience right down to its overlooked position.

Junior
Nothing can prepare you for junior year, except maybe a few years of boot camp. Despite two years to get used to the water, SATs, APs, and college admissions frenzy add up to one never-ending, hectic year that you never signed up for. Likewise, from the first cascading bars of the deceptively titled opening track "Everything in Its Right Place," you know you're slowly slipping into an alien territory otherwise known as Radiohead's Kid A.
As dense and complex as the whirlwind of tests, projects, and college visits, not even the vast leap into the world of electronica of OK Computer could prepare even the seasoned Radiohead fan for the highly anticipated Kid A. The familiar guitars are virtually absent, or at least drastically distorted until they're indistinguishable from the synthesizers and sound effects that dominate the record. Although the album can be disorienting, there is a strange cohesiveness throughout the tracks. It opens to a slow but ominous start, easing you into its depths until it suddenly drops you into a track like "Idioteque," a frenetic climax of haunting synthesizer samples, pulse-pounding beats, and Thom Yorke's ghostly falsetto. Then there are the eerie instrumental tracks like "Treefingers" to match those odd moments of intense calm during all-nighters pulled for term papers. That's the beauty of Kid A--just when you think you've gotten the hang of it, it whirls back out of reach, much like junior year. The only thing that remains constant in both is that nagging feeling that the world is going to come crashing down soon.

Senior
Finally, the long-awaited senior year. Congratulations, you've survived three years of high school and have therefore earned the right to look down on everyone else. It's the most hyped and trumped-up year, and no one knows much about anything beyond it. It's also the most erratic. The first half of senior year is as overwhelming and emotional as junior year because of college admissions and the grades that still count, but the second term is for sitting back and moving in new directions. The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is their senior year of sorts, a double-disc epic both praised for its collection of 28 varied but all emotionally loaded songs and criticized for its pretentiousness. The first disc, titled "Dawn to Dusk," is the angrier of the two, including the nihilistic anthems "Zero" and "An Ode to No One." Of course, senior year also brings with it the moments of cheer when you know the workload will end soon, and the first half mixes in delicate songs. The second disc, "Twilight to Starlight" is an emotional mountainscape, starting off with the agonizingly pissed off cries of "love is suicide" in "Bodies" to the drum machine pop reminiscence of "1979" to the gentle chorus of "Beautiful." And fittingly, the last couple of songs are about love, great to listen to as you think back over four years of infatuations and put the finishing touches on your crush list.

Finally, the tearful farewells at the end of the year can't be better summed up than in "Farewell and Goodnight." After four albums and four years of school respectively, one can only expect the Smashing Pumpkins and Stuy students to leave with a bang.