With all due respect to Hot Boys, Gravediggaz and Ruff Ryders — and putting Wu Tang to one side as a category entirely of their own — this has to be the single greatest hip hop supergroup record of all time. Released a year after OutKast‘s breakout Stankonia had opened the world’s ears to the possibilities of Atlantan funk, it features Big Boi and Andre throughout, but also Cee-Lo Green, Bubba Sparxxx, Killer Mike, all Cee-Lo’s Goodie Mob compadres and more besides. And what’s glorious about it is that even with a cast of dozens, it feels truly like a group effort. It’s a party record in the vein of the best p-funk albums (and as much sung or chanted as rapped), it’s as modern as anything Timbaland or The Neptunes were doing at the time, but it’s deep rooted in boom bap beats, booty electro, and Prince-style funk all at the same time too. Perhaps it was eclipsed by being a curious diversion from Outkast’s meteoric rise — Loveboxxx / The Love Below was soon to follow, cementing their global status — but it absolutely, to this day, stands up with their best, and with anything else of its time.

In retrospect, this collective-effort posse record isn’t just the culmination of a decade’s hard work cultivating the ATL hip-hop scene according to its most creatively ambitious clique — it’s a transitional torch-passing. Goodie Mob were falling apart after the negative reception to the creatively-compromised World Party, OutKast would follow up their experimental watershed Stankonia with what was essentially a double-solo album, and albums like Cool Breeze’s East Point’s Greatest Hit and Witchdoctor’s …A S.W.A.T Healin’ Ritual wound up cult classics instead of unit-moving blockbusters. But they all sound so amped and freed and alive on Even in Darkness that cuts like “Follow the Light” and “6 Minutes (Dungeon Family It’s On)” still feel career-peak caliber. And while the future of Organized Noize in the 2000s lied more in scattered hits than the album-length session-band statements that made them feel like the Bar-Kays of the ’90s, this big last hurrah doesn’t feel like a finale. Instead, the collective does what they do best: invoke the past (the long tail of the spark that happened when Kraftwerk and P-Funk started showing up in the same crates) while perceptively anticipating the future (solo breakout Cee-Lo; a young-and-hungry Killer Mike) that would take the Dungeon Family diaspora through unexpected routes to crossover success.