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The 10 Best Albums of 1996

These are the best albums of 1996 as selected by Slant’s music writers.

The 10 Best Albums of 1996

In my introduction to Slant’s list of the 100 Best Albums of the 1990s, I described nostalgia for the decade as “an idealized vision of a time when Bill Clinton was the fresh, young Democrat on the block, beepers were the hottest new tech items, and every major record label and Top 40 radio station was scrambling to discover the next big alternative to run-of-the-mill pop.” I went on to lament: “It’s human nature to look back on things with irrational fondness and nostalgia, overlooking the bad and romanticizing the good. But while the ’90s had its fair share of ‘crap,’ it’s hard to deny that the ‘good’ was exceptionally good.” So good, in fact, that we decided to dust off our lovingly curated list of over 400 albums to compile individual Top 10s for each year of the ’90s. Many of these titles are already widely—and rightfully—celebrated, but these lists also give us the opportunity to honor some typically overlooked gems. Sal Cinquemani

Honorable Mention: R.E.M., New Adventures in Hi-Fi; Tori Amos, Boys for Pele; Rage Against the Machine, Evil Empire; Maxwell, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite; Tool, Aenima; Dr. Octagon, Dr. Octagonecologyst; Ghostface Killah, Ironman; Jamiroquai, Travelling Without Moving; Red House Painters, Songs for a Blue Guitar; Sublime, Sublime


The 10 Best Albums of 1996

10. Sheryl Crow, Sheryl Crow

The mid-1990s was a sort of wasteland for alternative pop, the standard of which was to mix ordinary pop songwriting with samples, hip-hop beats, and electronic flourishes. This post-grunge, postmodern, and seemingly post-everything approach wasn’t unlike the similar synth-driven boom of the ’80s, as both resulted in a stream of one-hit wonders but also the occasional masterpiece, like Beck’s Odelay. Sheryl Crow, like Beck, found a rare balance between retro, organic rock and slick glam-pop on her eponymous sophomore effort, for which she took full rein of production duties, partially in response to suggestions that she was a mere puppet to the all-male team who helped shape her critically hailed debut. As such, there’s a palpable, fear-driven ambition to Sheryl Crow that served the artist well: She not only avoided the dreaded sophomore slump, but produced the best album of her career. Cinquemani


The 10 Best Albums of 1996

9. Aphex Twin, The Richard D. James Album

Simultaneously too hot to handle and too cold to hold, Richard D. James’s eponymous album is more fascinated by textures than almost any other electronic album ever crafted. Aphex Twin’s beats aren’t really beats at all, but rather more like cultivated mini organisms colliding clumsily atop a luminescent Petri-dish dance floor. If Kraftwerk once claimed “We are the robots,” Aphex Twin pulls back his android skin to show you the pulsating, quicksilver-pumping meat underneath. The album’s occasional penchant for schoolyard gross-out effects on the order of Ween (i.e. the punchline of “Milkman”: “I would like some milk from the milkman’s wife’s tits”) only proves he’s human after all. Eric Henderson


The 10 Best Albums of 1996

8. OutKast, ATLiens

Never has an album title been more indicative of its content than ATLiens, which reconciles dirty, laconic Southern rap with spacey, outlandish funk. The album smoothly introduced many of the sounds and themes that OutKast would further explore on Aquemini and Stankonia, and while most would point to single “Elevators (Me & You)” as the groovy apex of ATLiens’s mashed-up style, it’s actually the title track that best combines the album’s usage of Southern-fried lingo, swirling synth basslines, R&B vocal sampling, crisp percussion, and spaced-out atmospherics. “If you like fish and grits and all that pimp shit,” André 3000 alerts listeners, “then everybody say oh-yeah-yer.” Kevin Liedel

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The 10 Best Albums of 1996

7. Fiona Apple, Tidal

It’s not that Janeane Garofalo didn’t have a point about Fiona Apple when she skewered the singer’s infamous “This world is bullshit!” VMA acceptance speech in A Reading from the Book of Apple, but it’s not like Apple’s debut album, Tidal, didn’t lay bare her brattiness from the get-go. Raw and unpolished, it’s an immature album that’s equal parts angst and hubris, with Apple’s forceful piano playing and husky alto portending every last note and syllable with a lifetime’s worth of gravity. But that actually works in the album’s favor, in the way that it suggests that Apple knew that the full extent of her talent had yet to be tapped, but that she was already awfully damn good. Go with yourself. Jonathan Keefe


The 10 Best Albums of 1996

6. Ani DiFranco, Dilate

The title of her previous album may have been Not a Pretty Girl, but it was on Dilate that Ani DiFranco got real, real ugly. DiFranco turned the outrage and indignation she’d previously directed toward political injustice on herself, and what keeps the album from sinking into navel-gazing or from becoming an insufferable downer are DiFranco’s conviction and the sincerity of her performances. “Superhero” is a damning read on her own status as a cult hero, pushing beyond mere self-deprecation into biting self-parody, but it’s “Untouchable Face,” which turned a simple “Fuck you” into a hook nearly 15 years before Cee-Lo, that best captures the balance of loneliness, rage, and wit that made DiFranco one of the decade’s most singular voices. Keefe


The 10 Best Albums of 1996

5. Weezer, Pinkerton

Pinkerton is a tired, cranky album, but therein lies its brilliance: It doesn’t lack for well-delivered mania and pathos. Gone here is the likable teenage ragamuffins of The Blue Album, and in their place stumbles a group of world-weary men ravaged by the wake of unimaginable success. And so, in typical Rivers Cuomo fashion, we get brilliant rants on the emptiness of sudden fame (“Tired of Sex”), continued romantic disappointment (the hilariously bittersweet “Pink Triangle”), and a wonderfully disjointed, attention-sapped lead single (“El Scorcho”). Perhaps Pinkerton was the advent of Weezer’s slow decline into mediocrity, but it remains their most intricate, introspective, and serious work, brimming with a well-layered creepiness and complexity that the band has rarely matched since. Liedel


The 10 Best Albums of 1996

4. Belle & Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister

The formerly ambitious collective may have settled into a latter-day comfort zone of fuzzy twee inflected with black humor and veiled Christian morality, but there was a time when Belle and Sebastian’s shrewdly sad voice still seemed new and sparkling. Tigermilk established the group’s foundation, reshaping the lonely narratives of outsider kids into tales of forlorn virtue, and If You’re Feeling Sinister cemented its allure, with song after song profiling sad-eyed teenagers raised to near-sainthood by Stuart Murdoch’s lovingly precise lyrics. Carrying the Scottish mantle of astute, defeatist pop crafted in lightly adverse conditions, the band made their fragile constitutions into their greatest asset. Jesse Cataldo

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The 10 Best Albums of 1996

3. Fugees, The Score

By the mid-’90s, there weren’t many emerging hip-hop acts that managed to or even desired to escape tiresome gangster clichés, which made the Fugees’s belated surge on mainstream consciousness especially refreshing. The Score was all about organic and soulful grooves, forged primarily through the sampling of soul and reggae. Lauryn Hill’s prominent role both as rapper and chief singer also helped, fronting “Killing Me Softly” and “Fu-Gee-La” with wonderful vocal performances. Benefitting from a lengthy recording process and being granted complete artistic control, both Wyclef Jean and Pras sound relaxed here, clearly reveling in The Score’s laissez-faire atmosphere. Huw Jones


The 10 Best Albums of 1996

2. DJ Shadow, Endtroducing…

Ever since Edison invented the phonograph, a loud faction of musicians and critics has claimed that new recording technologies will rob music of its aura and obliterate the spontaneous beauty of performance. I want to send everyone who’s entertained such arguments a copy of Endtroducing…, invite them to dwell in its unpredictable space of loops and samples and observe how masterfully DJ Shadow repurposes his source material in service of his own creative vision. When sampling from music by Björk, T. Rex, Metallica, and KRS-One, even the score to Blade Runner, he favors tones and textures over familiar melodies, and in that sense, it’s the recordings themselves, rather than songs, that are his true medium. Endtroducing… is an experiment in hip-hop animism, with DJ Shadow drawing out the living essence of his record collection and channeling it in remarkable new directions. Matthew Cole


The 10 Best Albums of 1996

1. Beck, Odelay

Beck’s music could be viewed as the antithesis of the grunge movement’s dejection and angst. Odelay is his magnum opus, a wacky jukebox record that blends countless sounds and styles with a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward musical conventions. Fundamentally, it’s a giddy celebration of spastic genre-bending, where blues, folk, and country melodies are fused with propulsive beats and eccentric, monotonous rapping. And with tracks driven by Beck’s unmatched ear for party-starting hooks, Odelay manages to remain coherent while nevertheless reveling in its spazzy unpredictability. Jones

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