For the, Leave Home was an aspirational album title. Free dancehall riddims to download free. Despite the critical hosannas, the Ramones didn’t sell many copies of their 1976 debut, a situation that made the make-believe brothers from Queens restless to break out of their borough and conquer the world. The solution seemed easy: take the couple grand extra Sire gave them for a second album and record a colorized version of their first album.

All the essential elements remained in place—the songs still zip by at the speed of light, every hook ramming into the next—but everything seemed bolder and louder than what came before, as if the problem with the debut wasn’t the formula but the execution. Stardom eventually would happen for the Ramones, but the hits they craved never materialized. If anything, Leave Home marked a step backward in that regard, peaking at 148 where Ramones went to 111. But by falling short of the group’s grand ambitions, the album crystallized the conundrum at the heart of the Ramones: no matter how badly they yearned for hits, they couldn’t help but sound like variations of their basic selves.

Territory’s economy amid an 11-year recession. The board that is overseeing the island’s finances said Friday it will eliminate a $25 million scholarship fund for Puerto Rico’s largest public university, as well as a $50 million annual fund for cities and towns struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The board said it also will scrap an annual Christmas bonus for all government employees starting next fiscal year. The measures were a blow to Gov. Define austerity.

Maybe this consistency is part of the reason why Leave Home often gets dismissed with the praise that it merely offers more of the same. To an extent, that’s true: often, it seems like the Ramones are determined to deliver an answer to their debut, writing responses to their glue-sniffing escapades, Nazi flirtations, and horror film infatuations. They even cherry-picked another old frat-rock hit (1960’s “California Sun”) to reiterate that their heart lied in the music made before the Beatles. But viewing Leave Home through that prism undersells how the record sounds and feels very different from its predecessor.

Part of the Ramones’ charm is how they seemed like renegades from an underground comic book—a degenerate answer to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, celebrating all the glories that slithered out of the sewer. On the debut, all this filth still seemed nasty, but there is a slight shift in tone on Leave Home that pushes the band toward caricature. Some of that derives from the album’s comparative thematic lightness: The group may still be huffing fumes, but they’re not selling their bodies on a street corner; the inherent scuzz and sleaze no longer feels quite so dangerous. Instead, the band sell their rebellious stance with a smile, turning a freak show taunt into the rallying cry of “Gabba gabba, we accept you/We accept you, one of us.” Elsewhere, the band shows hints of heart—they’re advocating for the woman subject of “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl,” and their griping about Sire on “Swallow My Pride” reveals some of Joey’s soul—but those moments are overshadowed by hooks so oversized they seem cartoonish. Like before, the hooks are extrapolated from singles that cluttered the AM airwaves in the ’60s and early 1970s, and if the trash aesthetic doesn’t seem as artful here as it does on Ramones, blame it on the decision to try for a hit. Never mind that the Ramones’ version of a hit was decidedly low-rent—all the group wanted was to play the catchy parts as loudly and quickly as possible—because the Ramones could never differentiate between what would appeal to a larger audience and what was best left unsaid. They’d throw away their most immediate melody on “Carbona Not Glue,” a song that couldn’t make it on the album due to legal reasons, and they’d play their sweetest harmonies with the intensity of a buzzsaw.