Steely Dan’s debut album, 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill, is one of the perfect albums of the Seventies: a tight, clever collection of songs that eschew the blues guitar and heavy riff heroics of their Zeppelin/Sabbath contemporaries in favor of neon-street razzle-dazzle, showmanship, jazzy guitars, and the cryptic lyricism of down-on-your-luck middle class poetry. The follow-up, Countdown To Ecstasy, is the perfect example of the sophomore slump. It doubled down on the jazz influences and at times resembled a tight 1940s bop trio filtered through big early Sixties pop groups, albeit without the three-minute in and out aesthetic. Indeed, their second album’s flaw (if it can be called one) is a lack of sticking to radio pop forms. This was evident in how it stalled on the charts, and how it failed to produce any big singles.

Like so many groups before and after, their third album was the big make-or-break moment – would they stick around for the long haul, or would they fizzle out into obscurity? Pretzel Logic showed that Steely Dan were a band with a plan to make a career out of it. That’s not to say the jazzy adventurous nature of Countdown went anywhere. What really happened is that the band succumbed once again to the lure of tidy pop songwriting as a sort of constrained writing exercise. The result was an album that, while not as good as their debut or their highwater mark, 1977’s Aja, runs a pretty close third in their discography. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker proved their worthiness to ascend to the songwriting duo ranks of glory, turning out song after song that sounded as though you’d been hearing it forever, even if you’d encountered it for the first time. The fact that a track like “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” – a song with a hook the size of Saturn embedded in it – was relegated to being a B-side for “Rikki” is both criminal and a great indication that the band was simply overflowing with great material by the mid-Seventies.

Steely Dan has gotten the reputation of being the ultimate Dad Rock band over the last fifty years, sometimes with derogatory intentions. Part of that is probably that they put out their best work just before punk washed over the Western world, and while they weren’t exactly the sort of bands that punk was gunning for, their music is basically the antithesis of the punk ethos. Steely Dan are very much not three chords and an attitude. Those chords are jazz chords and while there’s an attitude, it’s very much a sunglasses-and-cigarettes wise guy cool, cracking obscure witticisms between cryptic lines. There’s a large contingent of fans on shitposting Twitter who swear by them, though, and it’s because of them that I’ve grown to have an appreciation for them outside of their most obvious singles. So if it’s dad rock, fine; I don’t know if I need to prove my cutting-edge bona fides or anything, but I’m a dad, and I think it rocks.