Seether’s Rare On Air takes you back to the days when you’d hear “Fine Again” on the radio and keep the station on because the band was coming in to play live. You knew the song well enough to catch every little thing they did differently, and that was half the fun. This new collection brings together 13 radio and in-studio performances from the South African band’s early touring years, when songs like “Remedy” and “Broken” were becoming rock radio staples.

“Driven Under” opens the set, taking us back to 2002’s Disclaimer, the album that introduced much of the U.S. to Seether. It’s a good song to start with because so much of its tension comes from the way Shaun Morgan holds back in the verses. He sounds like he’s choosing his words carefully, and you spend the whole time waiting for him to stop doing that. “Fine Again” and “Broken” come from that same album, though a lot of listeners first heard “Broken” as the duet with Evanescence’s Amy Lee that arrived two years later.

The track list doubles as a trip through a few years of rock radio. “Remedy” and “The Gift” come from Karma And Effect, while “Fake It,” “Rise Above This,” and “Breakdown” pick up the story with Finding Beauty In Negative Spaces. There’s room for some of the songs you had to buy the album to get to know, too. “69 Tea” turns up just three tracks in, and “Fade Away,” tucked away near the end of Disclaimer, gets the last word here.

Pearl Jam’s “Immortality” will ring a bell for anyone who remembers Seether’s 2006 acoustic album One Cold Night, which included a performance of the song from Philadelphia’s Grape Street Club. Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done” goes back even further, to a song that could quiet a room in two minutes. Those choices fit a singer who’s always been able to get a room’s attention with a line delivered just above a whisper. The big choruses made Seether a fixture on rock radio. Rare On Air gives you a chance to hear what Shaun Morgan does in the seconds before they hit.