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The 50 Best Rock Albums of the ’90s

It’s hard not to look back at the ’90s as not just rock's creative and commercial zenith, but its last great stand.

Nirvana
Photo: Geffen Records

“Good music was popular by mistake,” alt-rock pioneer Tanya Donelly famously said of the early 1990s, when grunge, the bastard stepchild of punk and metal, gave rise to multi-platinum superstars like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. One-hit wonders weren’t in short supply in the ’90s, but many, like Donelly’s band Belly, were far from disposable.

Countless rock acts of the era displayed an impressive ability to adapt, even as the industry swiftly reverted to the status quo by the turn of the century: self-proclaimed “loser” Beck evolved from slacker punk to pop-music hero; R.E.M., a band for which the tag “alternative” was practically invented, released at least two of the best pop-rock albums of all time; and Radiohead, who started the ’90s as a bunch of post-grunge creeps, successfully harnessed the then-burgeoning electronica movement in ways others failed to.

In hindsight, it wasn’t rock or electronica, but hip-hop that won the long game, as it continues to dominate pop music while rock—though it evolved and expanded throughout the first decade of the new millennium—has all but evaporated from the mainstream. Guitar-wielding rabble-rousers like Phoebe Bridgers give reason for hope, but it’s hard not to look back at the ’90s as not just the genre’s creative and commercial zenith, but its last great stand. Sal Cinquemani

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Use Your Illusion

50. Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion

Rock n’ roll is littered with epic-length opuses, but Guns N’ Roses’s sprawling, 30-track Use Your Illusion I and II truly challenged the old adage that less is more. The second volume is widely considered to be superior, its tracklist a bit leaner and its singles—including the cynical, politically charged “Civil War”—more challenging (the nearly nine-and-a-half-minute “Estranged” doesn’t even have a traditional chorus). But a single-disc compilation, released in 1998, distills the twin albums down to their most essential (and best) elements, including both of the abovementioned standouts as well as the country-inflected “You Ain’t the First,” electrifying covers of Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” and Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” both versions of Axl and Izzy’s hard-rock lullaby “Don’t Cry,” and, of course, the quintessential power ballad of the decade, “November Rain.” Turns out, sometimes less is more. Cinquemani



(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

49. Oasis, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is an album of such astonishing hubris it would be shocking if it had come from practically anyone else other than Liam and Noel Gallagher. Oasis’s 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe, may have been wildly aspirational, but their sophomore effort saw the Gallaghers making a sincere and concerted effort to be the biggest rock band in the universe. Their goal seemed to be to out-rock the Beatles themselves, adding screaming distortion and massive, anthemic choruses on top of Noel’s Lennon-esque melodies. This approach would have easier to dismiss as hot air if those hooks weren’t so damn good, but ultimately, it’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s audacity that makes it as fun as it is. Liam’s cocky Manchester brogue is a perfect avatar for the band’s public persona at the time, whether he’s hyping up raging vamps like “Some Might Say” and “Morning Glory” or adding cheek to the natural sensitivity of “Wonderwall.” By the time the band gets to the closing “Champagne Supernova,” they sound at once brawling and beautiful and big enough to actually justify their egos. Jeremy Winograd

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Copper Blue

48. Sugar, Copper Blue

It’s hardly surprising that Bob Mould enjoyed his greatest commercial success in the immediate wake of Nevermind. But Copper Blue wouldn’t have enjoyed the sales or acclaim it did if it were just another Bob Mould album. Recruiting the powerhouse rhythm section of Malcom Travis and David Barbe, he fashioned the sadly short-lived Sugar’s debut album as the perfect entry point into his catalog. Combining the thunderous wall of guitars that characterized his work with Hüsker Dü with the most infectious melodies of his career, Copper Blue practically plays like a greatest hits album. Some songs sound very of the moment—the bright college-rock jangle of “I Can’t Change Your Mind” turned it into an MTV hit, while the punchy “A Good Idea” nods to Kurt Cobain faves the Pixies. Others sound like the culmination of Mould’s entire songwriting oeuvre to that point: “Hoover Dam” and “Man on the Moon” provide the kind of heaving blood-and-tears catharsis that only he can. Winograd



The White Stripes

47. The White Stripes, The White Stripes

On their 1999 self-titled debut, Jack and Meg White developed a visual aesthetic and playful mythology that they’d go on to refine on future albums, but they had the tunes to prove they were more than just a peppermint-twisted gimmick: “St. James Infirmary Blues” and “I Fought Pirhanas” showcased Jack’s penchant for bluster and idiosyncratic wordplay, while “One More Cup of Coffee” and “Suzy Lee” highlighted the then-husband-and-wife duo’s capacity for subverting blues conventions with purpose. The songs here still impress for how lean they are, maximizing the interplay between Jack’s fiery guitarwork and Meg’s inimitable drumming. They’d get far more ambitious on future albums, but “Jimmy the Exploder” and “The Big Three Killed My Baby” have remained classics within their extraordinary catalog for more than 20 years. Jonathan Keefe

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Last Splash

46. The Breeders, Last Splash

Throughout their on-and-off career, the Breeders would set fire to the rock handbook of the “dirty white boys” that former Pixies bassist Kim Deal and her sister, lead guitarist Kelley Deal, butted heads with while coming of age in small-town Ohio. Deathly allergic to even the slightest whiff of prog-rock pomposity or hair-metal cheese, the Breeders shatter pop-song structure like a pane of glass before unceremoniously gluing the shards back together. That means the band’s full-bodied melodies are surrounded by sharp, haphazard edges, like the leftfield string harmonics on “Do You Love Me Now?,” the nails-on-a-chalkboard guitar feedback on “Mad Lucas,” and Kim’s unmistakable harmonica mic-distorted yelps on the decade-defining hit “Cannonball.” Last Splash, the Breeders’s breakthrough sophomore effort, isn’t beholden to any fixed definition of genre. “Drivin’ on 9” is a fiddle-infused country ballad wherein Kim earnestly sings about shotguns and highways. The Deal sisters have cited Led Zeppelin as an early influence, and “S.O.S” is the closest the Breeders got to something of an “Immigrant Song,” with its charging drumming and bluesy guitar sludge. A memento of a bygone era when the underground took up residence at the top of the charts, Last Splash is a winsome expansion of alt-rock that refused to fit into even that restrictive box. Sophia Ordaz



Spiderland

45. Slint, Spiderland

A product of its time that also transcends its particular era, Slint’s 1991 album Spiderland sounds astonishingly contemporary today, what with the band’s post-rock synthesis of punk and hardcore inherited by a slew of current bands, including Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dry Cleaning, La Dispute, and Black Country, New Road. The album opens with “Breadcrumb Trail,” David Pajo’s jangly guitar and Brian McMahan’s spoken-word mumble quickly segueing into a mix of distorted guitars and anhedonic vocals. With its wiry guitars buzzing over slurred vocals, the nearly eight-minute “Good Morning, Captain” sounds like a post-punk musical score for Apocalypse Now or a David Lynch-esque reimagination of Moby Dick. The 2014 deluxe edition of the album, which includes demos, practice sessions, and a live take of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” further illustrates Slint’s range, raw chemistry, and continued relevance. John Amen

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Metallica

44. Metallica, Metallica

Depending on your point of view, Metallica’s 1991 self-titled album (better known as The Black Album) was either an artistic triumph or an act of selling out. To this day, thrash purists scoff at the lack of speedy, double-bass tempos and intricate multi-metered arrangements, but in their place is a nuanced swagger and sonic finesse arguably missing from the band’s beloved ’80s output. Producer Bob Rock is often chided for exerting too much influence over the band, but it can’t be denied that he knows how to make records sound amazing. Under his tutelage, frontman James Hetfield’s grit-choked growl is augmented with actual harmonies, and the group’s guitar tone is heavier than ever, flowing from the speakers like lava, as molten-black as the album cover. Aside from the obvious hits—“Enter Sandman,” “The Unforgiven,” “Nothing Else Matters”—other highlights include the sinister “Don’t Tread on Me” and the melancholic death march “My Friend of Misery.” Brian Theobald



Repeater

43. Fugazi, Repeater

Counter to the righteous-fury claustrophobia of Ian MacKaye’s earlier band, Minor Threat, he and Guy Piciotto’s guitar work on Repeater, Fugazi’s debut, feels expansive and free, creating a universe unto itself. While that certainly doesn’t mean MacKaye was done with his sociopolitical ranting (he rails characteristically against capitalistic greed throughout the album, including on, uh, “Greed”), it did allow him to tap into a broader and richer sonic and emotional palette than what can usually be attributed to hardcore. While the dive-bombing riffs of the title track, the shouted refrains of “merchandise!,” and Joe Lally and Brendan Canty’s urgent rhythm section provide more than enough evidence that MacKaye hadn’t gone soft, the manner in which the album straddles MacKaye’s hardcore past and then-burgeoning alt-rock is what makes it sound unique, even so many years later. Indeed, it’s on the slower tracks—the murky, unsettling “Shut the Door,” the slow burning highway rocker “Blueprint”—where Repeater finds both its emotional core and the reason why it stands alone in the punk canon. Winograd

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Superunknown

42. Soundgarden, Superunknown

With the band’s homebase of Seattle having suddenly become the center of the music universe by 1994, Soundgarden’s fourth album, Superunkown, quickly hit number one on the Billboard charts and turned the band into a mainstream force practically overnight. While they remained tethered to their heavy metal roots through wild time signatures, unusual guitar tunings, and lead guitarist Kim Thayil’s meaty shredding, they achieved their big leap by ratcheting up the slick melodicism they’d begun to explore on 1991’s Badmotorfinger. The results proved that Soundgarden could do everything that their fellow grunge giants could and more; they could certainly out-riff Pearl Jam, and in the album’s darker moments (“Mailman,” “Limo Wreck”), frontman Chris Cornell unleashes a wail that rivals Kurt Cobain’s. But in his prime, Cornell was a readier showman than his peers, and he renders chestnuts like “My Wave” and “Spoonman” as rollicking reminders that, at its best, grunge wasn’t just about angst. It could also be a good time. Winograd



Rage Against the Machine

41. Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine

“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” Zack de la Rocha screams on “Killing in the Name,” the second track on Rage Against the Machine’s eponymous debut. Later, on “Take the Power Back,” the target of his insolence gets more specific: “Motherfuck Uncle Sam, step back, I know who I am.” Over 50-plus minutes, he and bandmates Tom Morello, Tim Commerford, and Brad Wilk unleash on the structures of an oppressive system as they see it, asserting themselves as the undeniable heirs apparent to political and rap-infused metal. The band’s galvanic blend of guitar-driven riffs and compressed solos, blistering rhythms, and aggressive, seething vocals were and continue to be mesmerizing. The album is still sonically and attitudinally spellbinding, its subversive bent as timely today as it was when it was released. Amen

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Vs.

40. Pearl Jam, Vs.

There’s no discounting the strength of the hits on Pearl Jam’s 1991 debut, Ten, but track for track, the band’s follow-up bristles with a raw urgency, from Dave Abbruzzese’s frenetic drumming on “Go” to Eddie Vedder’s blood-curdling screams on the aptly titled “Blood.” And while they’ve arguably never rocked harder than they do here, they flaunt a penchant for funk on “Rats” (complete with a nod to Michael Jackson) and hint at their attraction to more meditative material on the hypnotic “Indifference.” Of course, Pearl Jam’s pop-crossover prowess is on full display on the Top 40 hit “Daughter” and the cathartic “Rearviewmirror,” which builds to an emotional and musical climax in which the song’s central metaphor reaches a satisfyingly momentous conclusion: “I gather speed from you fucking me/Once and for all, I’m far away.” These songs have all aged surprisingly well—none more so than the tribal “W.M.A.,” which addresses the seemingly timeless topic of police racism in America, and “Glorified G,” which mocks the country’s gun fetish. Cinquemani



Goo

39. Sonic Youth, Goo

Rather than try to one-up Daydream Nation’s ambitious sprawl, Sonic Youth narrowed their focus on their follow-up, Goo, producing an album that’s tighter, edgier, and, yes, slicker. As the band’s debut for Geffen, Goo predictably caught flak from fans for its cleaner, more professional production style, which stood in contrast to the avant-garde noisiness of Sonic Youth’s indie days. But the album’s glossy production did nothing to diminish the captivating balance of melodicism and dissonance that defines Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s guitar interplay. In fact, the band may never have produced a better showcase for that interplay than “Dirty Boots,” which squeezes almost every defining facet of Sonic Youth’s sound—hypnotic chug; distorted swagger; slow, mesmerizingly lilting arpeggios—into just five-and-a-half minutes. And yes, “Kool Thing” may have been an MTV hit, but it’s still fucking weird, with its Chuck D cameo and Kim Gordon sneering about “male white corporate oppression.” Winograd

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Star

38. Belly, Star

Many of the songs on Belly’s 1993 debut, Star, were originally written for singer-songwriter Tanya Donelly’s previous band, the Breeders, and several tracks were helmed by Pixies producer Gil Norton. The album, however, is more sensual and surreal than anything produced by the band’s immediate progenitors; there’s a distinctly feminine quality to Star, and Donelly’s pixie-ish persona and quirky lyrics seemingly rendered Belly less worthy of the critical-darling status that many of their (mostly male-fronted) contemporaries earned from the rock press at the time. But that doesn’t render her oft-oblique musings any less evocative or moving: “Feed the Tree” is a proposal of lifelong commitment wrapped in obscurity, a meditation on eternal life and love; “Untogether” smarts with intelligence and shrewd, tell-it-like-it-is observations (“You can’t save the unsaveably untogether”); and typical relationship troubles are given refreshing perspective on “Every Word” (“Uh-oh, oh, you gave me too much room/So I filled it up with chairs you can’t sit on”). But Donelly also shared with Kurt Cobain a desire to merge pop with punk, and it’s that marriage of mainstream sensibilities and alt-rock aesthetic that allows Star to continue to shine so brightly. Cinquemani



Nowhere

37. Ride, Nowhere

The early ’90s witnessed the rise of a new crop of artists whose grandiose sonic aspirations were tempered by serious introspection, bands capable of suffusing the strident sumptuousness of stadium rock with the quietude of lo-fi bedroom pop. Chief among these was Ride, whose thunderous debut, Nowhere, offered a packed roster of aggressive material cut through with an essential airy gentleness, songs which struggled to reconcile their reflective cores with a consistent impulse toward transcendent intensity. Epic in scope while humble in topic and tone, tracks like “Seagull,” “Polar Bear,” and “Vapour Trail” grapple with everyday problems by summoning up lyrical fantasias rife with eccentric imagery, an approach that bleeds over into the music’s majestic confluence of mumbling vocals and soaring melodies. Rich and bombastic, the album meshes sadness and elation in a twinned celebration of emotional expansiveness, evoked via slithery, sinuous rhythms encased within a wistful haze of shimmering atmospherics. Jesse Cataldo

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Summerteeth

36. Wilco, Summerteeth

Wilco’s fourth album, 1999’s Summerteeth, proved to be a much-needed course-correction away from the stuffy, self-serious alt-country of their first few efforts. Jeff Tweedy and company began incorporating less conventional structures into their brand of proto-Americana, and to thrilling effect. With its sing-along melody and anthemic chorus worthy of Matthew Sweet or Fountains of Wayne, “Nothingsevergonnastandinmyway (Again)” is a power-pop triumph, while “She’s a Jar” and “A Shot in the Arm” foretell the more self-consciously artsy pivot that the band would make with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Summerteeth stands as an essential listen, then, not just for the unimpeachable quality of the group’s songcraft, but also as a harbinger of one of the following decade’s most compelling run of albums. Keefe



Bossanova

35. Pixies, Bossanova

Despite the growing rift between Pixies frontman Black Francis and bassist Kim Deal, Bossanova united the disparate sounds found on the band’s first two albums, bringing back the garage-band rawness of Surfer Rosa while maintaining Doolittle’s increased emphasis on melodicism. For the first time, Francis wrote every song on the album, in some instances claiming to have scribbled lyrics onto a napkin in the studio five minutes before recording. Deal’s tempering backup vocal is relegated to an afterthought amid Francis’s power grab over the group, but her thrumming bass remains the pulse of tracks like “Is She Weird” and “Velouria.” At the time, no one juxtaposed quiet and loud like the Pixies, a groundbreaking approach that would go on to influence alternative rock throughout the ’90s, and Bossanova oscillates from chill surf-rock inflections to shrieking, distortion-laden fury. Despite the band’s acrimony, which would lead to a protracted hiatus within a few short years, Bossanova roils and quakes with the intense energy of a volatile band barely holding together its fraying edges. Josh Goller

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Alien Lanes

34. Guided by Voices, Alien Lanes

Following the success of 1994’s Bee Thousand, the once basement-bound Guided by Voices were suddenly a real live touring rock band. But rather than make a corresponding upgrade to mainstream production values, they stuck to their lo-fi guns with Alien Lanes, an album full of beer-soaked performances, rickety guitars, barely finished snippets, annoying cassette tape hiss, and some of the most transcendent power-pop melodies ever written. Like any Guided by Voices album, the obvious warts—someone snoring over the entirety of “Ex-Supermodel,” for instance—are part of the charm. But not even Bee Thousand can match the staggering number of Robert Pollard classics—“Game of Pricks,” “My Valuable Hunting Knife,” “Watch Me Jumpstart,” “Motor Away”—that Alien Lanes collects in one breakneck, 28-song, 41-minute package. “C’mon, c’mon, the club is open!” he jubilantly exclaims as the opening track, “A Salty Salute,” starts to fade out seemingly almost as soon as it begins. It’s a fitting refrain for the most generous album by the world’s most generous rock ‘n’ roll band. Winograd



The Fragile

33. Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile

The Downward Spiral is heightened like a singularly bad day as experienced by a lonely adolescent. The Fragile is a reluctant adult’s unglamorous acquiescence to the tether chaining him to his own fetid, fatigued psyche. Trent Reznor’s overtures still smack of vaingloriousness, but the feigned cry for help that was so puckishly irritating in The Downward Spiral seems more subtly tragic within The Fragile’s unhurried, two-disc sprawl. As the man himself screams in the pounding opening salvo “Somewhat Damaged”: “Too fucked up to care anymore.” And he, the frail, the somewhat damaged, and the starfuckers alike are all in it together, for the long painful haul. Eric Henderson

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69 Love Songs

32. The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs

Chamber-pop misanthrope Stephin Merritt actually lets a little bit of sincerity shine through on 69 Love Songs, though his cockeyed worldview and unparalleled smartassery still permeate each song on his magnum opus. One of Merritt’s strengths as a songwriter is his economy, and the majority of these tracks pack an entire album’s worth of ideas, one-liners, and hooks into songs that barely scratch the two-minute mark. But what works best about 69 Love Songs is that Merritt’s steely precision doesn’t scan as emotional detachment. There’s ample snark in songs like “Time Enough for Rocking When We’re Old” and “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin,” but “Come Back from San Francisco” and “Papa Was a Rodeo” prove that even the most committed of ironists can try a little tenderness now and then. Keefe



Out of Time

31. R.E.M., Out of Time

What would teenagers make of this album if it came out today, when radios are as obsolete as dodos? Hell, what did we make of it when it came out yesterday, when people still bought CDs? Yes, even in 1991, when this blissed-out masterwork was released by what used to be the greatest band in the world, it also felt a little out of time. A queer street preacher whose earnestness and fierce conviction to his belief system recalls that of a Flannery O’Connor cook, Michael Stipe hurts his way through 11 sterling tracks—two with an angel (Kate Pierson) sitting on his shoulder—that represent the band’s most eloquent and poignant reckoning of life, love, and the purpose of their music. The observations are sad, sometimes bitter and self-doubting, but the mood remains strangely, jarringly, beautifully happy. Ed Gonzalez

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Different Class

30. Pulp, Different Class

Jarvis Cocker may have found an updated role as one of pop’s most urbane dirty old men, but Pulp’s appeal was always more wholesome than raunchy, working off the juxtaposition between his willowy cocksman character and the sympathetic sweetness of his lyrical sketches. These songs use sex as a blurry lens for character elaboration, best shown on a track like “Live Bed Show,” whose surface vulgarity is all cover for a forlorn tale of lost love. The band grants the same depth to black-out drug use (“Sorted for E’s & Wizz”) and social exile scene (“Mis-Shapes”), establishing new depth in the most tired examples of rock ‘n’ roll excess. Cataldo



Laughing Stock

29. Talk Talk, Laughing Stock

Talk Talk’s late albums, with their hushed tones and mystical tree covers, invoke a kind of quiet devoutness, an atmosphere that by their last album had reached a level of near-saintly purity. The songs are so quiet it’s easy to miss their bountiful movement, pieces slowly locking and unlocking, forming elaborate structures with organic precision. Laughing Stock stands as their finest work both because of the enormous variety it contains, moving from strict ambient minimalism to spooky jazz to bursts of lacerating noise, and its sense of a private sonic world springing up out of primordial nothingness. Cataldo

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The Battle of Los Angeles

28. Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles

More last roar than last gasp, The Battle of Los Angeles is one of Rage Against the Machine’s most pointed efforts, an unnerving blend of socio-political outrage and rock-fueled irreverence that served as an excellent final chapter in the group’s too-short career. For a band that was already masters at delivering jackhammering music with both precision and gusto, Zack de la Rocha and company excel in delivering The Battle of Los Angeles’s explosive salvos: The siren guitars of “Calm Like a Bomb” wail with urgency, “Guerilla Radio” builds like a restless wave, and “Mic Check” is a foreboding stutter driven by de la Rocha’s invectives against overreaching capitalism. Kevin Liedel



Dig Me Out

27. Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out

Rawer than what passed as emo and more rebellious than what passed as punk, Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out found a trio of reformed riot grrls crashing the alt-rock boys club in unimpeachable style. The searing guitar licks on “Words and Guitar” showed that they could play with as much swagger and ingenuity as any “classic” rock act, while “Little Babies” called out patronizing male fans even as it gave them something to dance to. But their secret weapon was Corin Tucker’s hurricane wail, never put to better use than on the standout “One More Hour.” Here Tucker anguishes over her breakup with bandmate Carrie Brownstein; the fact that the band stayed together and stayed awesome for the next decade suggests that the song must have been as hugely cathartic to perform as it is to hear. Matthew Cole

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The Soft Bulletin

26. The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin

Having spent the preceding decade as one of music’s most revered experimental pop acts, for 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, the Flaming Lips jettisoned some of the problematic, self-consciously fey trappings of their previous work and distilled the elements that worked best about their distinctive take on modern pop into song structures that were as accessible as they were adventurous. The result was a deliberately constructed, refined new sound and a landmark album that was both influenced by and superior to the music of its era and which, in retrospect, stands as one of the finest, most important and influential albums of its decade. A testament to careful, selective editing, The Soft Bulletin recast the Flaming Lips as far more than a quirky cult act and laid the groundwork for their commercial and artistic breakthroughs in the years that followed. Keefe



Dilate

25. 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 indignance she had 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

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Mellow Gold

24. Beck, Mellow Gold

The 12 tracks that proved Beck wasn’t a one-hit loser, Mellow Gold is a curiously dark album from an artist who had not yet completely established his weird-cool credentials. The song that put Beck on the map almost seems like an afterthought when compared with the rest of Mellow Gold’s bizarre, and at times nightmarish, alterna-rap-folk brilliance. Gliding effortlessly from grisly, pitch-bending hip-hop (“Soul Suckin’ Jerk”) to slacker pop adventure (“Beercan”) to gorgeous, surreal tragedy (“Blackhole”), Beck confidently stepped out from the shadow of the “Loser” label and gave us a preview of the inventive, genre-mashing artistry to come. Liedel



Bone Machine

23. Tom Waits, Bone Machine

Tom Waits albums always carry a certain stink of vaudevillian excess, seemingly conceived more for a broad stage performance than intimate listening. Only Bone Machine remains so staunchly dedicated to its themes, uniform in both message and tone, creating a consistently entrancing experience. A pitch-black mediation on death, racking up the highest body count this side of a Nick Cave album, Waits tilts his gruesome instrument toward sinister ends, from wholesale slaughter for sport to invocations of end-times austerity. Many artists have plumbed this kind of dark territory, but who else has contemplated mortality on songs that sound like they were played on actual bones? Cataldo

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Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

22. Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

The grungy art rock of Smashing Pumpkins’s Siamese Dream laid the groundwork for the baroque opus that is Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—perhaps not their most concise work, but one in which the band fully realized the potential of their darkly romantic sound. The ambitious concept album is notable for its contributions to the increasingly angsty, emo-ish direction of alternative music in the mid-’90s, but its real heart lies in the beautifully peculiar pieces that meld turn-of-the-century, art-nouveau visuals with Billy Corgan’s hot-n-cold emotions. Full of moments where abrupt emotional swings are the norm (the archaic, harp-driven ode that is “Cupid De Locke” next to the children’s book tale of “Stumbleine” next to the relentless machine gun riffs of “Fuck You,” for example), Mellon Collie is a graceful, wonderfully moody rock symphony. Liedel



Parklife

21. Blur, Parklife

If Pulp was Brit-pop’s loveable lechers and Oasis was the cadging, sour romantics, then Blur was the resident humanists, finding time for droll character sketches that retained a beneficent compassion toward their subjects. Their first big album, Parklife, is also their most thorough examination of mass idiosyncrasy, from the urban pastoral observations of the title track to the working-class escape of “Bank Holiday” to the sexual populism of “Girls and Boys.” As a collection of portraits, the album seems like a younger cousin to the Kinks’s Village Green Preservation Society, a classic portrayal that’s resolutely English but also broadly universal. Cataldo

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Pinkerton

20. Weezer, Pinkerton

Pinkerton is a tired, cranky record, but therein lies its brilliance: no shortage of well-delivered mania and pathos. Gone were the likable teenage ragamuffins of The Blue Album, and in their place stumbled 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 the band has rarely matched since. Liedel



Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

19. Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Perpetually trapped in the long shadow of Slanted and Enchanted, Pavement’s second album doesn’t have the surprising punch of the first, but its chops are equally solid, stuffed with memorable melodies and off-kilter humor. Dropping wild drummer Gary Young and the fuzzy sound that dominated the first album may have seemed like an attempt to erase their roots, but casting off these distractions ended up throwing the band’s structure into sharper relief. Astute enough to pull off an aural joke like “5-4=Unity,” an off-time tribute to Dave Brubeck’s “Take 5” that’s also a splendid song on its own, the album effortlessly highlights the band’s musicianship and brains. Cataldo

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Achtung Baby

18. U2, Achtung Baby

U2 greeted the 1990s by casting off the proselytizing cocoon of their Reagan-era music and delivering the transformative Achtung Baby, the first and greatest of their ’90s offerings. Here is where Bono ceased being the scruffy Irish chap singing about war-torn vistas and instead adopted the seductive rock-star persona of “the Fly,” a brilliant composite of Jim Morrison and Michael Hutchence, and an undeniable poke at bombastic pop theatricality. So, too, does U2 become models of efficiency, not wasting one second of their blitz into globe-conquering arena rock: Every track is a gem, from well-known anthems like “One” and “Mysterious Ways” to lesser-known treasures like “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)” and “Acrobat.” Rarely does a musical metamorphosis sound this instinctual. Liedel



If You’re Feeling Sinister

17. Belle and 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. Cataldo

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In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

16. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Underneath all the marching-band tempos and piles of instrumentation, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea stands out as one of the most effective examples of dread cloaked in bright, hammering noise. From the three-part intro of “King of Carrot Flowers,” where a solitary acoustic strums are slowly buried by a clamoring wave of new sounds, these songs act as exercises in raw emotion padded with the kind of busy din that distracts from the heartrending gloom of the lyrics. Over everything is the quivering voice of Jeff Mangum, the de facto force behind this singularly sustained explosion of melancholy. Cataldo



The Downward Spiral

15. Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral

What can be said of Trent Reznor’s industrial odyssey that isn’t gleaned from the monstrous presence of “Closer”? Though “Hurt” went on to receive a second life in America’s mainstream music consciousness and “March of the Pigs” is ultimately a more interesting track, “Closer” is The Downward Spiral in six, awesomely frightening minutes: intuitive, conceptual, highly self-aware, and a perfect slice of beat-driven horror music with a brain to go with its lumbering limbs. With Nine Inch Nails’s sophomore effort, Reznor proved that he had an ear for hitting the space between the extremes, balancing melody and erosion, hooks and white noise, ecstasy and dread. The Downward Spiral is nightmare and dream as one: at times inspiring, but almost always scary as hell. Liedel

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Slanted and Enchanted

14. Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted

The coarse and fuzzy sound of Slanted and Enchanted resonated with every teenager furiously strumming power-chord combinations in their parents’ garage, because it seemed Pavement was, like them, revelling in the stripped-down, lo-fi aesthetic like pigs in shit. Now, rather than emulating the über-polished rock of the 1980s, teenagers could shoot for a sound that wasn’t too dissimilar to what was blaring from their own hand-me-down amplifiers. Slanted and Enchanted brought music fans closer to their idols through its grainy production and illusion of amateurism, but was stuffed with enough expert lessons in treble-heavy rock to maintain the necessary distance. Huw Jones



Weezer

13. Weezer, Weezer

“My name is Jonas,” Rivers Cuomo chokes out in the first few seconds of the so-called “Blue Album,” and hence begins our dive into the lovably nerdy, garage-dwelling world of Weezer. Before Cuomo the Creep fantasized about underage Japanese girls writing him fan letters or Cuomo the Hack recycled old ideas into paeans to Hollywood, Cuomo the Geek was crooning in quirky self-deprecation about his 12-sided die, his love of surfing, and of course, his Buddy Holly glasses. Backing him was an equally endearing dork fellowship that somehow managed to deftly channel influences as disparate as the Beach Boys, KISS, and the Cars into one of the most fascinating and catchy rock debuts of the decade. The Blue Album turned out to be Weezer’s best moment, wonderfully capturing geeky, escapist memes years before the Internet ever got its hands on nerd-dom. Liedel

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Live Through This

12. Hole, Live Through This

Released one week after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Live Through This is an advertisement of Courtney Love’s bald-faced punk ambition—which explains, though only in part, the offensive, still-persisting rumors that Cobain co-wrote the songs. It didn’t help that he was a remarkably allusive and sensitive lyricist, and that the songs on Live Through This are among punk’s, well, most allusive and sensitive. But these are not the rants of a self-proclaimed feminist, but those of an actual woman, voraciously hungry for attention, impossibly obsessed with her image, unbearably self-doubting, and capable of unexpected compassion. The album’s fabulously deranged tapestry of metaphors and similes are inextricably tied to a very female-centic sense of suffering, and their meaning is made lucid not by Love’s less-than-surprising guitaring, but by her beyond-exceptional range of feeling. This harpy will fuck you, kill you, cut herself, then cry over the pieces of flesh she holds in her hands, but she will never lie to you. Gonzalez



Rid of Me

11. PJ Harvey, Rid of Me

PJ Harvey showed us her long snake moan on Dry, and with Rid of Me she rubbed it red and raw. That lunatic groan, her instrument of choice, is a force of supernatural nature that expresses a wide range of yearnings, and like the album’s crude production, it freakishly manages to be sly, seductive, and absolutely terrifying all at once. Yes, you don’t need to look at her face—or know that there’s a “Snake” on the tracklist—to understand that she fancies herself a medusa. Fertile with rage and desire, deserts are her stomping ground, but also the place where she exiles herself from guyville, knowing what she could do to its populace. There’s nothing poignant here exactly, but you still feel sorry for the girl all the same. This most unusual siren, so existentially obsessed with seduction and annihilation, both loves and hates her powers. To murder or to commit suicide, that is her question. Gonzalez

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Siamese Dream

10. Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream

It turns out that Billy Corgan being an OCD-ridden control freak was a good thing, as it allowed the world to savor perhaps one of the most lush, artiest rock records of all time. Long rumored to be singlehandedly recorded by Corgan himself, Siamese Dream married the slow, thick crunch of the Pumpkins’s early Sub Pop sound with a visceral, self-conscious melodrama. “Freak out and give in,” Corgan whispers in the album’s opening moments, “doesn’t matter what you believe in.” From the hammering string quartet that drives “Disarm” to the misleadingly sweet breakdowns of “Geek U.S.A.” and “Silverfuck,” Siamese Dream is a masterful blend of poetry and hate, and a velvet-fisted rock opus that elevated teenage angst into an art form. Liedel



The Bends

9. Radiohead, The Bends

The Bends signalled the end of the mucky post-grunge Radiohead of Pablo Honey, and embraced the quirky sense of experimentation that has defined them ever since. Tracks like “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” “Bullet Proof…I Wish I Was,” and “Fake Plastic Trees” suggest that the album was a stepping stone to the groundbreaking OK Computer, and many have dismissed it merely as a prequel to a much more refined sound, but The Bends is a fantastic record in its own right: “Just” is a storming rock jaunt, “Black Star” and “Planet Telex” are impassioned apocalyptic epics, while “High and Dry” is a beguiling alternative anthem despite Thom Yorke’s protests that it sounds like a Rod Stewart song. Jones

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Exile in Guyville

8. Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville

At the time of its release, rock critics couldn’t look past their instant hard-ons stoked by Phair’s liberal use of four-letter words and her blunt statements of sexual desire to engage her debut record on its own terms. Now, nearly 20 years out, a whole new generation of indie kids have rushed to discredit Phair because of what had been written about the supposed novelty of Exile in Guyville. While Phair’s legacy may have been cheapened by some of her latter-day recordings, to reduce her debut to the “Even when I was 12” line from “Fuck and Run” or the entirety of “Flower” is grossly shortsighted, and it’s hard to imagine another rock album whose reception has been so consistently tainted by active misogyny. Keefe



To Bring You My Love

7. PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love

Moving away from the punk and blues formalism of her first two albums, Polly Jean Harvey embraced theatricality on To Bring You My Love. If not her most accessible recording, it’s perhaps her most sweeping and epic, at turns delicate and vile in its explorations of love. Whether she’s equating sexual desire with religious fervor on “Send His Love to Me” or subverting gender archetypes on the furious, ecstatic “Long Snake Moan,” Harvey’s songs teem with a deep hunger. To Bring You My Love recasts lust as both emotional and physical violence, as Harvey tries to reconcile the need for the titular “You” with her supreme desires for attending to her own needs. It’s a record that trades in power dynamics, and Harvey fights tooth and nail to keep the upper hand. Keefe

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In Utero

6. Nirvana, In Utero

Following the glossy punk sound of their breakthrough Nevermind, the decision to recruit producer Steve Albini for Nirvana’s follow-up was quite clearly an effort to somehow distance the band from their newfound mainstream success. Albini’s stripped-down approach to recording In Utero caught Cobain and company at their raw and abrasive best, emphatically dispelling claims that the group was selling out. With the album’s gentler moments buried beneath dense cacophony and filthy riffing, the ugly categorically triumphed over the beautiful, warts and all. Jones



Loveless

5. My Bloody Valentine, Loveless

Loveless is one of the quintessential headphones albums. Its dense sound collages do their most powerful work when heard in full detail, which is why I was recently surprised to read that My Bloody Valentine had a reputation for being one of the loudest live acts in rock history, to the point of inflicting real pain on their audiences. Naturally, I rigged up my sound system as loud as I could without risking eviction, and proceeded to reinterpret Loveless. And sure enough, the record is as physical as it is cerebral: You can feel the terrifying density of the loud songs and the sexual pulse of the relatively tranquil ones. Loveless ranks with the best work of Hendrix, Zeppelin, and Sonic Youth as a testament to the elemental power that a human being can wrest from a guitar. Cole

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Grace

4. Jeff Buckley, Grace

Take one part Nina Simone and one part Frank Sinatra, marry them with the precise but unabashed roar of a Zeppelin record and the scrappiness of a folk-punk troubadour and you might start to come close to describing Jeff Buckley’s music. Sometimes frightening, sometimes soothing, but always invariably sexy, his was a voice that, emerging in the wake of the pitch-imperfection of grunge’s most famous screamers, seemed remarkable in both its precision and purpose. It’s why he was able to make Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and the ghostly English hymn “Corpus Christi Carol” his own, and his originals, like “Last Goodbye” and “Lover, You Should Have Come Over,” songs that only he could sing. Cinquemani



Automatic for the People

3. R.E.M., Automatic for the People

By 1992, R.E.M. had transformed from one of the originators of the alternative rock tag into one of the biggest mainstream rock acts in the world, and Automatic for the People confronted the band’s uneasy relationship with that metamorphosis head-on. Michael Stipe’s imagist poetry is at its most reflective and intuitive, as songs like “Try Not to Breathe,” “Find the River,” and the extraordinary opening cut, “Drive,” all lay bare deeply personal insecurities about becoming one of rock music’s elder statesmen. However twitchy R.E.M. may have felt about their massive commercial presence, Automatic for the People emerges as the band’s most timeless recording for the way in which Stipe’s lyrics and especially Peter Buck’s guitar work translate their personal anxieties into meditations that resonated on a broad, populist level. Keefe

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Nevermind

2. Nirvana, Nevermind

Just as Kurt Cobain’s supposed dread of fame turned out to be a more complicated love-hate dynamic, Nevermind’s confrontational pose is also a calculated bid for acceptance. Never as hard or as dangerous as the brutal bands from which Nirvana drew their inspiration, they nonetheless synthesized one of the best examples of hard influence softened into digestible material. The progression from raw to radio-friendly is often equated with dumbing-down, but here it’s a twofold boon: creating great songs and opening, through Cobain’s unabashed love for the bands he was weaned on, a gateway to a hidden world of fantastic music. Cataldo



OK Computer

1. Radiohead, OK Computer

A mere two years after The Bends established Radiohead as a uniquely serious force in the alternative music scene, OK Computer shattered the notion that Thom Yorke and company even belonged within the limits of a standard genre. On OK Computer, Radiohead places us directly into a Huxley-esque world that we only caught glimpses of throughout previous records, where the band—paranoid, helpless, and fatigued—is simultaneously alienated and entranced by the dominance of computers. In technology, there is both the beautiful and mundane: “In a neon sign scrolling up and down, I am born again,” Yorke sings on “Airbag,” and alternately, “One day, I am gonna grow wings, a chemical reaction,” on “Let Down.” The record glistens in the angst and pleasure of that contradiction, and its remote, disquieted beauty has rarely been surpassed. Liedel

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