You could make a strong case that Athens, GA's Time Toy was ahead of its time.

Twenty years, to be exact, when considering their first studio album, Fly Swatter/Ice Water, was actually recorded in the mid-1980s. Dubbed the "Crown Princes of Hyperactive Fun" in a local newspaper in 1986, Time Toy - Bryan Cook (vocals), Danny Cottar (guitar & bass), Paul Hammond (guitar & bass), and Robby McMahan (drums) - stood out among its mid-80s Athens, GA music scene peers with its quirky, danceable New Wave-tinged rock and anything-goes live show.

Time Toy quickly developed a dedicated, cult-like following - a fanbase which grew exponentially after the band was featured in Tony Gayton's seminal documentary, Athens, GA: Inside/Out with R.E.M and Pylon, among others.

With money saved from touring the East Coast, the band put their idiosyncratic, rhythmically complex sound to tape with producer/engineer John Keane (R.E.M., Widespread Panic, Indigo Girls) at his studio, recording sixteen songs in two sessions during the course of a couple of years. While one track - "Window Sill" -was physically cut from the master tape for inclusion on a 12" quadruple single also featuring the Bar-B-Q Killers, Mercyland, and Eat America, the rest of the album remained tucked away in the archives of Keane's studio and remained unreleased for the next two decades.

A few years ago, Cook asked Keane for a copy of the tape to see if it was still around. "The tape was so old, when you played it, little pieces of magnetic tape would come off, literally destroying it as it played," says Cook. "When Keane realized this, he actually baked the tape in his oven. It made the tape a little rubberier so that we could get one more play out of it. This is the fruition of the last play."

About that same time, the owners of athensmusic.net were starting Iron Horse Records, a label that would release out-of-print and unreleased albums from Athens bands. According to Cook, "One of the guys asked Keane what he had that was recorded but never released, and he immediately said, 'Time Toy.' Since I was already kind of doing that, it lit the fire for me."

Like the album, the band had also laid dormant at the end of the 80s as the members' lives began to move in different directions. "Robby got married and moved on with his life, which is completely understandable," says Cook. Friend and multi-instrumentalist/drummer Juan Molina (ex-Little Tigers), stepped in to fill the void left by McMahan's departure, but as Cook says, "To work another drummer in on something that had been woven together over such a long time seemed daunting to say the least. It seemed more like impossible." The band continued for another year and half with that lineup before deciding to put Time Toy on hiatus as its members scattered to other parts of the country.

Cook moved to Atlanta for a time but eventually journeyed back to Athens and moved in with Hammond. Hearing that McMahan had moved back to the area, Cook gave him a call, and soon after, a reunited Time Toy with Molina on bass performed a one-off show in Athens in 1998. Despite at least ten years between their last practices, the band immediately picked up right where they left off. "I get shivers thinking about it," says Cook, "The moments are all still there - the inside jokes, the moments in between beats, the little dance moves - we just basically knew it inside out." According to Cook, the show once again put Time Toy "in the back of our minds," and in the summer of 2005, the original Time Toy lineup with Cottar on bass performed at the famed 40 Watt club as part of the Athens: Rewind celebration, and then again a year later during AthFest 2006.

Does this also mark the second coming of Time Toy? "It's sort of like we've been separated and now we're trying to be married again," says Cook of Time Toy's future. "We're all into supporting this record, and we've started practicing. We're old now, but we aren't dead yet." With the release of Fly Swatter/Ice Water, it seems as if Time Toy's quirky journey has only just begun...again.