Thirty years (and change) after three piano-punk weirdos from Chapel Hill kicked down the door of a guitar-obsessed alt-rock scene, Ben Folds Five is getting the deluxe treatment it has always deserved. Ben Folds has announced Ben Folds Five (30th Anniversary), a newly remastered and expanded edition of the trio’s 1995 self-titled debut, arriving September 4 via Capitol/UMe on 2CD and 2LP 180-gram black vinyl, with digital streaming and download versions also on the way. Pre-orders and pre-saves are live now.

The headline for longtime fans is the un-vaulting of the band’s mythical “Shelved First Attempt” — a full alternate version of the debut LP that Folds, Robert Sledge, and Darren Jessee cut in a three-week Philadelphia session with producer Dave “Stiff” Johnson, only to shelve it when the results didn’t feel like them. The tapes were presumed lost to time until Folds recently stumbled across a DAT in his personal archives. It’s been freshly remastered and paired with the original album, offering early alternate takes of seven debut tracks, an unheard performance of “Evaporated” (which would eventually land on 1997’s Whatever and Ever Amen), plus three rare outtakes that never made the finished record: “Emaline,” “Dick Holster,” and “Eddie Walker.”

To preview the vault dig, the band has released “Underground (Shelved First Attempt)” today — a looser, scrappier peek at what might have been. Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Ben+Folds+Five+Underground+Shelved+First+Attempt

In his liner notes, a 59-year-old Folds offers a delightfully candid review of his 28-year-old self’s work: “Overall, it’s good! It’s NOT the kind of record you’d hear produced these days. It’s pretty rough and tumble, mostly in a good way. And it’s emphatically unique.” He points out something that gets lost in the streaming era — that Ben Folds Five was from “an era when you could still identify a band by the instrumentalists, before you’d even hear the vocalist.” Of the shelved sessions, he adds: “It’s not bad, though I recall it being hideous… It’s just not crazy like the album we all know.”

Recorded in just four days with the late Caleb Southern, the original Ben Folds Five landed in 1995 like a piano-shaped brick through the window of grunge, Britpop, and burgeoning pop-punk. No guitars. Power-pop energy welded to the Great American Songbook. Songs like “Jackson Cannery,” “Philosophy,” and “Underground” made college radio programmers lose their minds and quietly rewrote what alternative rock could sound like.

There’s more good news for fans who’ve been waiting more than a decade for a reunion: the original lineup of Ben Folds, Robert Sledge, and Darren Jessee will mark the anniversary with their first run of live shows together in 13-plus years. Full details are promised soon. In the meantime, a limited run of 1,000 vinyl copies signed by all three members will be available exclusively via uDiscoverMusic.com.

Ben Folds Five (30th Anniversary) is out September 4. Pre-order, pre-save, and start rehearsing your falsetto for “Song for the Dumped” — because a reunion tour is coming, and you don’t want to be caught unprepared.