for Schwarzenbach to sing over. In addition, the pick slide and lead guitar part that opens the track was swapped for Pfahler's drums. "Boxcar" was also re-made, with an increase in tempo. They altered those songs based on live performances sometime prior. Around this time, he wrote "Condition Oakland", which he felt was "a good summation" of recording music; as they had been playing it on tour, they opted to record it for their next album. Making the track at Brilliant was "pretty perfect" due to the studio's large size, making it "kind of a cavernous song". A sample of Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen was recorded for it by playing a cassette of performing, done by pointing a Shure SM57 microphone at a boom box speaker. Pfahler said the session with Anderson cost $500. As Albini preferred not to be credited, he was listed as the engineer Fluss in the album's booklet, which was the name of his cat. He reasoned that as Jawbreaker composed and played "and made the decisions [... they're] doing all the work, I'm sort of part of the equipment". For the 20th anniversary version of the album, he is credited as doing the recording, while Fluss is still listed as the engineer. John Golden mastered the album at K-Disc in Hollywood, California. Composition and lyrics Musically, the sound of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy has been described as punk rock, pop-punk, and emo. Dan Fidler of Spin said it was "composed of short, tight arrangements", centered around Pfahler's "furious drumming" and Bauermeister's "barreling bass". The latter realised the "value of pulling back and not doing fills every chance I got, but trying to put them in useful places and places that made sense". Schwarzenbach's vocals were compared to Paul Westerberg of the Replacements and Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs. The material on the album were Schwarzenbach-focused, instead of the more collaborative efforts on Bivouac. The latter saw the band lean towards a more progressive sound, while 24 Hour Revenge Therapy had simplified arrangements, closer to their debut studio album Unfun (1990). Schwarzenbach explained that the album dealt with a single relationship he had with a person. Givony wrote that the album largely details a story "familiar to every young person who moves to a new city, makes friends, falls in love, and reluctantly grows up"; the first three tracks fall out of this remit,