Die 150 besten Alben der 1990er Jahre

By Pitchfork

There was a time where there was nothing like the feeling of walking into your local Tower Records or Sam Goody and heading straight for the new releases section. The sight of racks of CDs lined up in endless rows of musical discovery offered the thrill of not knowing exactly what you were going to get. In the ’90s, it was likely that you had only heard one or two songs from an album, on the radio or MTV, before you forked over your hard-earned $20. Here are 150 albums that were more than worth it at the time, and that shaped the way music would sound in the decades to come.

Read Pitchfork's list of the best songs of the 1990s here, and check out our full ’90s package here.

For more about how we put together this list, read this letter from our editor-in-chief Puja Patel.

Our 2003 list of the best ’90s albums can be found here. Our 2010 list of the best ’90s songs can be found here.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Next Plateau / London

Salt-N-Pepa were a rebuke to the music industry's storied disdain for women rappers, having gone platinum on their first two records; by their fourth album Very Necessary, which quickly went multi-platinum, the trio could not be denied. They didn't change up their raison d’etre: Salt, Pepa, and Spinderella were still committed to women determining their own futures and calling out creepers and weirdos. But in the wake of the so-called "Year of the Woman," their career-long pop sensibilities congealed in the hits "Shoop" and the En Vogue-featuring "Whatta Man," positive anthems that remain stalwart in the wedding and auntie playlists. More than that, though, hip-hop was beginning to thaw to the idea of incorporating R&B and pop: Puff had convened Bad Boy Records in 1993, and genre-shifting cuts like Method Man and Mary J. Blige's "I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By" weren't far away. Salt-N-Pepa just happened to get there early. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

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Kill Rock Stars

Largely recorded in a single day for the price of a slice of pizza and a bottle of hair dye, Olympia/D.C. riot grrrl trio Bratmobile's 1993 debut Pottymouth is a scrappy vessel for nuanced feminist commentary and punk demystification. Beginning with an incendiary opener—"Admit it! Innocent little girls turn you on, don't they"—Bratmobile burn all the walls down. "Cool Schmool" uses sing-songy sugar to taunt pretentious scene politics, while the blistering "P.R.D.C.T." depicts the correlation between male-ego idolization and sexual violence: "You’re my punk rock dream come true/I would die to stay with you." Over the course of 16 tracks in just 28 minutes, Bratmobile established themselves as a revolutionary force. –Quinn Moreland

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A&M

On Superunknown, Soundgarden mixed some pop vulnerability into their Zep-influenced hard rock and broke into the mainstream. The album often gets grouped in with grunge—overdriven guitars abound, and yes, Soundgarden are from Seattle—but its pummeling riffs and Chris Cornell's one-of-a-kind wail transcended the genre's power chords and raspy sneering. The anthemic melodies are juxtaposed with bleak themes of death, despondence, and apocalypse that feel even more devastating following Cornell's 2017 suicide. The album remains an alt-rock anomaly, thundering and openhearted in equal measure. –Max Freedman

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Arista / BMG

The interracial romance-thriller The Bodyguard, starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, was the 13th biggest movie of 1992—a feat that had more than a little to do with the film's soundtrack, which featured Houston delivering six superbly written and produced tracks at the pristine peak of her vocal superpowers. First, there's the covers, including her ebullient remake of Chaka Khan's "I’m Every Woman," and her bold reconstruction of Dolly Parton's sentimental country-weeper "I Will Always Love You," which spent a record 14 weeks atop the Hot 100 en route to becoming one of the most beloved and hated songs ever, depending on your taste for pop schmaltz. Not to be overlooked are the album's original torch songs, "I Have Nothing" and "Run to You," performed by Houston with maximalist feeling and immaculate precision.

The Bodyguard became the highest-earning soundtrack of all time, surpassing Saturday Night Fever, and influencing generations of big-voiced divas like Christina Aguilera and Ariana Grande. It's easy to forget that the album also contains six other worthwhile cuts by artists like Kenny G and Lisa Stansfield—we might consider them more if Whitney didn't slay so hard. –Jason King

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Warner Music Japan / Birdman

Boredoms started in 1986 as something like a noise band, and ended three decades later as something like a mountain. The Osaka collective's fifth full-length comes the closest to encapsulating the entirety of their journey, with long passages of the ecstatic trance-rock that would characterize their later years, punctuated frequently with the cartoonish riffs and chaotic smash cuts that had been their specialty early on. At times, they sound like a hardcore band that never got the memo about brevity; at others, like a religious cult for whom the sound of a skipping CD is the embodiment of the divine. Two chords might repeat for 10 minutes, until that relatively small sliver of time feels like eternity. A crescendo might gain thrilling momentum only to slam abruptly into silence. Later Boredoms recordings and performances could resemble live-band DJ sets, with shards of noise and melody whirling around a single central pulse. On Super æ, they delighted in shaking listeners out of their flow states just as thoroughly as they did in drawing them in. These prankish interruptions and asides don't take away from the music's joyousness and near-mystical uplift; they enhance it. Meditation is one path to bliss. A good joke is another. –Andy Cush

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Dischord

To save hardcore, Fugazi had to destroy it and build something new from what scraps could still be salvaged. By 1986, Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye was bored and frustrated with the violent, pig-headed masculinity prevalent in hardcore scenes across the country. He found kinship in the arty introspection of Rites of Spring, whose singer-guitarist Guy Picciotto and drummer Brendan Canty joined the fold of MacKaye's next band. With these new members and bassist Joe Lally as collaborators, MacKaye paired slower and more rhythmically supple arrangements with an unrelenting commitment to his DIY, straight-edge values and the revolutionary spirit at the heart of the genre. After two tremendous EPs (later compiled on 13 Songs), 1990's Repeater was the definitive moment when "post-hardcore" finally crystalized. Over lacerating chords and a deft use of space, the band took the many indignities of the Reagan-Bush era into their own hands—a sound, and a political worldview, that would reshape scenes overnight. –Rob Arcand

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Philo

Iris DeMent opened her first album with a meditation on what happens to a person in the afterlife; after wandering through some of the more popular theories, she reached a practical conclusion: "I think I’ll just let the mystery be." "Let the Mystery Be" set the tone for 1992's Infamous Angel, a staggering debut across which the Arkansas-born singer-songwriter reflected on mortality, faded hopes, and bygone affections. Her voice authenticated every bit of heartache she sifted through the rubble and found the bittersweet beauty therein: "Our Town" endures as an album standout for how succinctly DeMent captured the tragedy of American dreams drying up, but the raw pathos of "Mama's Opry" and the sublime escapism of her take on "Fifty Miles of Elbow Room" are no less potent. –Allison Hussey

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Imago

The start of the ’90s found Aimee Mann world-weary and jaded, put through the wringer of MTV stardom and what would become many years of label troubles. It's no coincidence that Mann's solo debut Whatever—recorded independently with producer Jon Brion after a three-year stand-off with Epic—encapsulated all the shades of meaning derived from the word it was named after. Marrying wry and melancholic narratives that grappled with disappointment and disillusionment—be it at the hand of labels or lovers—Whatever ran the gamut from caustic kiss-offs and stubborn determination to resigned sighs of defeat and shrugging indifference. It set the tone for the rest of Mann's career, particularly as the decade would wear on, as an uncompromising songwriter with unparalleled gift for depicting the many different sighs of life. –Carrie Courogen

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Motown

The first single from Philadelphia vocal harmony group Boyz II Men's follow-up to their massively successful debut Cooleyhighharmony was titled "I’ll Make Love to You," a wholesome anachronism at a time when every other R&B artist wanted to creep, freak, knock boots, rub it down, or sex you up. (Listening to the song now, with its gentle lyrics about respectful consent, it actually sounds strangely progressive.) An article about II in Entertainment Weekly was headlined "Revenge of the Nerds" and noted that they still lived with their parents. But these nerds met at performing arts school, and their studious attention to their craft shines across the album, particularly on their a cappella cover of the Beatles’ "Yesterday." Uncool and out of step, II was a collection of lush crowd-pleasers that spoke to the silent majority of the record-buying public. Its influence endures across generations, passed down via family gatherings, proms, and weddings; these days, Boyz II Men count Tyler, the Creator, BTS, and Justin Bieber as their biggest fans and collaborators. –Jessica Suarez

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Capitol

When Mark Linkous died for the first time, in a London hotel room in 1996, he was brought back to life by paramedics. Despite a challenging recovery, the Sparklehorse leader returned to music with a heightened awareness of the world around him. Fittingly, Good Morning Spider sounds like the album an alien might produce after getting a glimpse of life on Earth. These proudly eclectic songs are full of reverence for things we mostly take for granted: tiny creatures, overlooked moments, forces outside of our grasp. Musically, the album tends toward a natural state of entropy, veering from cowpunk to rural blues to dusty AM rock. (And when Linkous managed to pull off a radio-friendly pop song like "Happy Man," he was sure to bury it under static.) Where his previous work seemed to quietly conjure the ghosts of his rural Virginia home, Good Morning Spider plays like a chaotic celebration of everything that's outside and alive. –Mehan Jayasuriya

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Prophet

Recorded while holed up in North Memphis, Mystic Stylez is Three 6 Mafia's horrorcore sound at its most skin-crawling. The songs feel like they’re never going to end—they’re unhurried and drawn-out, like the scene in a good slasher flick where the killer may or may not be about to strike. Moments as small as the pitched-down vocals on the opening of "Sweet Robbery" or the punishing drop on "Break Da Law ’95" hit you like a jump scare; Juicy J and DJ Paul's beats are one-of-a-kind and truly cinematic, with brooding piano lines, tripped-out samples, and hi-hats that tick like a climbing heart rate. Collectively, their writing feels as if they’re all competing to rap the most shocking bar, and the nightmarish tone is emphasized by colorful and hyper-specific references to satan, coffins, and soul snatching. It's not just a great album, but a dark text on how to push the limits in rap. –Alphonse Pierre

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LaFace / Arista

In the time of b-girls and baggy overalls, Toni Braxton emerged on the cover of her self-titled debut with a sultry but low-key sexiness—high-waisted jeans, a white tank, a leather jacket slung off her shoulders, an of-the-moment pixie cut and a red lip. Coming off the success of the Boomerang soundtrack, Braxton's first album is a crooning, bluesy deep dive into the agony of heartbreak. Produced by the era-defining Babyface and L.A. Reid, along with famed producer and hit maker Daryl Simmons, Braxton's alto is punctuated by the post-new jack sound yet still sounds like a throwback. The album put her on the map—she won three Grammys for it and spent weeks at the top of the charts—and has remained a staple, especially for the grown, sexy, self-aware of us who aspired to its posture. –Samhita Mukhopadhyay

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Polyvinyl

By the fall of 1999, the members of American Football were done with college, with emo, and with American Football itself. The trio had decided to break up even before the release of their first full-length; thus, the album turned out to be a farewell from a band that had scarcely introduced itself. American Football was also a rebuke of the Midwestern scene that had been shaped by the incalculable long-tail influence of Mike Kinsella's previous one-album supernova Cap’n Jazz, rerouting emo's bloodline from hardcore toward minimalist jazz and meditiative math-rock. It's likely that no album on this list had less impact on the actual 1990s than American Football, but few loom larger right this moment; after the bursting of the Myspace bubble, hundreds of bands took Kinsella's elliptical expressions of hope and heartbreak as unfinished business, rebuilding the genre on a foundation of open-tuned Telecasters, capos, and red and black flannels. Yet, while the sound of American Football is remarkably easy to replicate, its spirit of wistful carpe diem remains forever elusive. "You can't miss what you forget," Kinsella warns on "Never Meant," if not the greatest emo song ever then the most potent expression of preemptive nostalgia in a genre that does it better than any other. –Ian Cohen

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Ruthless / Relativity

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony made absence and the afterlife a focal point of their music: Their second album, E. 1999 Eternal, was less about the hurdles they scaled to achieve success, and more about those who would not be around to toast with them. Each track hit like a message to the grim reaper: The album worked through the stages of grief for those whose lives move too fast to properly acknowledge pain, yet still need something like closure. It is darkly comedic, treating death like both an intruder and unavoidable foe. The 808s are somber and steady as a marching band, giving center stage to lines that act as both introduction and eulogy. A year after the album's release, Tupac Shakur would be dead, and the Notorious B.I.G., shortly after—unquantifiable casualties that made it difficult for peers and fans to both grieve and remember. Coming from the only group to work with both of those artists, E. 1999 Eternal was a grim blueprint for moving forward while never losing sight of those not in the room. –Tarisai Ngangura

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Mute

We are lucky to live in the musical world that Depeche Mode helped create with Violator, their celebrated album of synthy, sexy gloom. At this point, it's mostly taken for granted that artists can crunch together pop, rock, dance, and electronic music into something capable of pleasing fans of each genre, or that deep, sensual darkness can writhe its way onto the radio—but it wasn't always like this; there's a line that runs straight from Martin Gore and Dave Gahan all the way on through to Finneas and Billie Eilish. "Personal Jesus" is so crisply produced that you’d think it was made yesterday, but it's "Enjoy the Silence" that is the album's best and most subtle moment, with a melancholy guitar line that still mystifies three decades years later. Violator sounded like the future when it arrived in 1990. Now, it sounds like everything. –Alex Frank

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Columbia

If all he ever gave us was "Hallelujah," Jeff Buckley would still be hailed as a tremendously influential artist whose drowning death at 30 remains an unfathomable tragedy. Fortunately for everyone who skips that track at this point (guilty), there's so much more to Grace than his cover of John Cale's cover of Leonard Cohen's most famous song. The son of a folk singer who also died way too young, Buckley drew from New York bohemia as well as from European chanson, from Patti Smith as well as from Edith Piaf, and that unusual set of influences—not to mention that voice—distinguished him then as now. Buckley savored the drama of unabashed beauty colliding with unrestrained noise: "So Real" erupts in orgasms of guitar distortion, quieted only by Buckley whispering, "I love you… but I’m afraid to love you." It's almost over-the-top, almost ridiculous, which makes its transcendence that much more impressive and daring. –Stephen Deusner

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Almo Sounds

Gillian Welch was in her late 20s when she issued her debut album, Revival, but she already sounded like a woman who’d lived through a few other lifetimes. Several years before she predicted the digitally induced collapse of the music industry, the singer-songwriter was writing tunes about lonesome left-behinds, heartaches that wouldn't quit, and sweet little Appalachian flowers. With producer T Bone Burnett, Welch built songs that were spacious in their sentiments, spare in their melodies, and quietly puckish in their view of the world, as guitarist David Rawlings, a steadfast musical companion to Welch over subsequent years, backed her cool and easy voice with prickling steel-string licks. Revival was the first plank in the career of a generational voice, one whose work feels both timely and eternal in any decade. –Allison Hussey

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Rounder

Modern Lovers founder Jonathan Richman was 41 when he released this sunny solo record, but he looks half that, nearly teenaged, on the album's cover. He sounds it, too. Richman's lyrical concerns involve the magic of new love, the despair of a disagreement with a roommate, and the joy of losing oneself on the dancefloor in a lesbian bar. I, Jonathan marries the airtight pop construction of Brian Wilson to the crustpunk ethos of K Records as it narrates all the triumphs and tribulations of 20s adolescence. Timeless is the word. –Peyton Thomas

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Mille Plateaux / Thrill Jockey

Oval has always been a highly conceptual project, as central figure Markus Popp could spiel for hours about the standardization enforced by digital audio software. Attempting to subvert such strictures, the German trio turned digital dysfunction into raw material: Physically damaging actual compact discs, they took the gnarly weirdness that sputtered out of the CD player and tiled these sonic splinters into glittering mosaics. But it's easy to divorce the polemical framing from the listening experience, and simply immerse yourself in Oval's stream of strange beauty—particularly on 94 Diskont's 24-minute standout, "Do While," which resembles a My Bloody Valentine song shoved through a paper shredder and collaged into a shimmering abstract sound painting. 94 Diskont almost single-handedly inspired a wave of glitchy late-’90s electronica woven out of skips and clicks, ranging from Herbert's twitchy but danceable grooves to punky noise-blasts like Lesser's influence-exorcizing jibe, "Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass." Oval's later releases grew conceptually top-heavy, but with 94 Diskont they created an ambient dreamscape as pretty and placid as it was disorienting and uncanny. –Simon Reynolds

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Kitchenware / CBS

Paddy McAloon, the eccentrically ambitious frontman of Prefab Sprout, has a habit of self-mythologizing. Read enough interviews with him and you’ll start wondering if half the abandoned projects he mentions—say, a Christmas album called Total Snow or a movie musical written with Spike Lee—actually exist somewhere in the vaults or were just momentary bursts of inspiration tested out against some befuddled music journalist. The English band's 1990 masterpiece, Jordan: The Comeback, however, makes you believe it's all true. Somewhere in its 19-song sprawl—which spans bossa nova party-starters, tear-jerking R&B ballads, and arena rock anthems—there's a narrative throughline about reincarnation, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and the imminent turn of the century, all delivered with enough gravitas for several Bible characters to make credible appearances. ("Hi, this is God, here," goes a particularly memorable opening line.) It might all feel like a puzzle—something to be studied and worked over rather than celebrated—if it weren't also filled with impeccable hooks and performances. Three decades later, the world finally seems to be catching up to its vision for cerebral, heartfelt pop. –Sam Sodomsky

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Columbia

A song cycle that moves from a passionate fling to a breakup to a reunion and marriage proposal, Maxwell's sumptuous debut album dilates one turbulent romance into a celebration of monogamous love and ’70s soul. To bring this retro vision to life, Maxwell enlisted accomplished collaborators like Sade saxophonist Stuart Matthewman and guitarist Wah Wah Watson, known for his work with Marvin Gaye and Herbie Hancock. But it's ultimately Maxwell's distinct voice as a singer, songwriter, and producer that powers these songs of courtship. His tender croon radiates vulnerability, his higher notes tinged with an anxious yearning. Marriage plots like this one are by definition conservative, but the rich details of Urban Hang Suite leave the door ajar for anyone who's horny and lovestruck. –Stephen Kearse

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Warner Bros.

Already a household name long before the release of Wildflowers, Tom Petty didn't need to go above and beyond his signature rich, driving rock’n’roll to ensure the album's success. But Wildflowers stood out precisely because it pulled back some of that anthemic rock sound. With its stripped-down production, and spartan, honed lyrics, his second solo record was a turning point for the then-44-year-old rocker into a wiser era, strolling through folk, blues, and rock—including the self-pitier's theme song "You Don't Know How It Feels"—depending on how the spirit of the moment moved him. –Evie Nagy

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Tresor

Detroit techno had always relished myths about the utopian promise of the information age, but no one took the epic, worldbuilding spirit of the genre further than Drexciya. From their first Deep Sea Dweller EP, James Stinson and Gerald Donald used the project as a vehicle for exploring the lingering traumas of the Black diaspora in the United States and beyond, creating an elaborate narrative of undersea people and nations rooted in the real history of the Middle Passage and Paul Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic. The duo's first album-oriented release, Neptune's Lair draws the legend of Drexciya into a larger-than-life story, using wonky synths, electro drum patterns, and pitched-down vocal samples to describe Drexciya's aquatic population and their quest to return to their homeland. Yet for all of the album's sci-fi imagery, Stinson and Donald always resist the allure of true escapism, consistently asking how speculative fictions can challenge the presumed immutability of everyday life and contribute to a social world as rich and all-consuming as the collective fantasies they document. –Rob Arcand

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Ensign / Chrysalis

I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got begins with a recitation of the Serenity Prayer and ends with the title track, an a cappella hymn of self-acceptance. In between, you’ll find the enormous range of the Irish singer-songwriter: a prophetic protest ballad ("Black Boys on Mopeds"), a 17th-century poem set to the "Funky Drummer" beat ("I Am Stretched on Your Grave"), a jaunty alt-pop us-against-them anthem ("The Emperor's New Clothes"). And, of course, the massive hit "Nothing Compares 2 U," originally written by Prince, but owned forever by Sinéad O’Connor. It's a breakup song so devastating it would tower over everything else around it on a lesser album. Instead, it stands as just another skyscraper in a skyline of heartbreak. –Amy Phillips

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Elektra

Where Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) described a self-contained world—Staten Island as Shaolin, martial arts movies and local Five Percenters as the only moral guideposts—Ol’ Dirty Bastard embodied the bleed between that realm and our own. After all, the lead single from his solo debut is named after a whole other borough. A lesser version of ODB would scan as a raucous live act who couldn't quite translate his shtick to record; the ODB we got was instead so radically unpredictable that any vocal take capturing his exuberance and idiosyncrasies became a perfect little time capsule, irreducible and irreproducible. Near Return to the 36 Chambers’ middle, a song is interrupted by ODB's wife excoriating him over his litany of affairs. He responds by singing four lines of "Over the Rainbow" and then snapping upright into more conventional verse—where he describes his style as "evil, like a Wicked Witch." –Paul A. Thompson

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Up

On Modest Mouse's second album, Isaac Brock stares down the open expanse of the American West and finds the placeless drudgery of urban sprawl where something like freedom used to be. The Lonesome Crowded West embodies the claustrophobia of late-’90s American cities—Brock's guitars creak and squeal with a creeping unease, carving sharp edges into the melodies of "Heart Cooks Brain" and setting his caterwauling screams ablaze on "Shit Luck." But that unsustainable mania gives way, more often than not, to quiet profundity: The clap-stomp folk-punk of "Cowboy Dan" melts into a meditation on being in nature and "thinking nothing," before just as quickly returning to its defensive crouch. Brock has a knack for spinning the bleakness of late-stage capitalism into postmodern poetry, finding romance in trailer parks and truck stop bathrooms. The Lonesome Crowded West is a death rattle for the American dream, the kind of album that will feel just as vital when all that's left are cockroaches, snow-drenched plastic forks, and half-decomposed cups laced with the thick syrup of Orange Julius. –Arielle Gordon

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Atlantic

As Tori Amos was writing her solo debut, the singer-songwriter had little faith on her side. Little Earthquakes followed her time in the short-lived synth-pop band Y Kant Tori Read; when she turned in a new album of stark piano and voice to Atlantic in 1990, the label rejected it and insisted on more guitars. But Amos—a minister's daughter who had been playing piano in bars since 15 and knew this music was her lifeblood—was nothing if not resolute. She fought to release Little Earthquakes as she intended, an album of revelations hammered through piano that stunningly recounts crises of faith and relationships. Songs like "Crucify" use religion as a springboard to forgive and stand up for oneself; on "Silent All These Years" and "Me and a Gun," Amos gives voice to survivors of sexual assault in powerfully unembellished words. Those songs led her to partner with the anti-sexual violence organization RAINN in 1994, still the largest of its kind in the United States. "I wrote my way out of my own private hell," Amos said in 2020. "Writing songs was the only way I was going to heal." With the soul-affirming music of Little Earthquakes, she made way for countless others to do the same. –Eric Torres

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Scat

In 1994, Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard quit his job after 14 years as a schoolteacher and bet it all on rock’n’roll with Bee Thousand. Throughout this DIY touchstone, Pollard cranks out distorted gems full of do-or-die spirit and misheard lyrics, as if he's recreating the greatest British Invasion songs that never existed directly into a four-track. Flanked by his Dayton, Ohio buddies, Pollard sounds insatiable and totally uninhibited. While his words rarely get more coherent than "goldheart mountaintop queen directory," there's something alchemical about the way he uncorks each phrase of poetic gibberish with everything he's got, conjuring indie rock myth out of thin air. –Steven Arroyo

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Talkin' Loud / Mercury / Universal

While some of his contemporaries were trying to legitimize drum ‘n’ bass by adapting it to the concert hall, Bristol, England's Roni Size orchestrated a double-disc exercise in musical excess that often feels as if it could’ve been the work of a very amped-up jazz ensemble. This is nimble, proper music, crisp as a freshly vacuumed carpet with not a single fiber out of place. The individual performances Size captures are brilliant—Si John plays standup bass in a strangely inverted way, as if he's watching himself in a mirror—but even as he's leaning on the ensemble or expertly tacking vocalist Onallee's sibilant runs to the ticks of the hi-hat, he never loses sight of the bigger picture. Take "Brown Paper Bag," where he holds the listener up in a hotel lobby for the first two-and-a-half minutes, then gleefully sprints out of the front door to dance. –Marty Sartini Garner

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Almo Sounds

When it began, Garbage was a project helmed by Nevermind producer Butch Vig, who, by 1993, was kind of a big deal. But when they released their self-titled debut with a Scottish female singer in 1995, it was definitely Shirley Manson's band—her fierce stage presence, outspoken attitude, and dark sense of humor would be the defining figure of the band. More pop than grunge but with plenty of grit and electronic edge, Garbage had layers of sharp production, but still felt raw thanks to Manson's sneer and biting lyrics. It was anything but humorless, though—the hit single "Only Happy When It Rains" was actually a dig at the band's own alternative scene and its preoccupation with misery, while "Stupid Girl" mocked privileged people who don't use their power or potential for good. –Evie Nagy

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Epic

Every generation gets the rap-metal it deserves (see: the loutish gum-swallowers who ruled the late ’90s), but in 1992, Rage Against the Machine gave us the rap-metal we needed. Hearing their revolutionary ruckus on the same rock radio assembly line as the Black Crowes and Guns N’ Roses felt like discovering a Molotov cocktail in a crate of milk bottles. Their self-titled debut spiked millions of suburban CD changers with desperate funk and radical leftist politics; Tom Morello's riffs conjured record scratches and sirens, while Zack de la Rocha punctuated the riot with exhortations and gut-shot grunts. Grunge bands of the day were nosing into darker corners, but only Rage seemed hellbent on flooding them with light—whether via truth or explosion. Even if you missed Rage's point then, you could tell they had one, and that made all the difference. –Brian Howe

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Nettwerk / Arista

For those who hear the words "Sarah McLachlan" and reflexively summon an image constellation of tremendous adult-contemporary mauveness—shelter cats, hemp skirts, Lilith Fair corsetry—Fumbling Towards Ecstasy is here to serve as a reminder of the singer-songwriter's formidable powers. Written alone in the mountains as the dark winter softened into spring, McLachlan's third album is a rough-hewn cathedral: abstract monsters lurk behind the formalist arrangements, under the flowing stream of her voice. Directly inspired by Talk Talk's experimental rock seance Spirit of Eden, McLachlan and producer Pierre Marchand undergird Ecstasy with a similarly shocking synesthetic precision—guitars strike at chest level like a conviction; chords shimmer out of a void, epiphanic; beauty blooms from stone. "Possession," a love song told from the point of view of McLachlan's real-life stalker, is the lodestar: alive, haunting, searching for some terrible grace. –Jia Tolentino

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Island

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world woke up changed. U2, huffing off the historical moment, followed suit with their own rebirth. Their seventh album, which began its gestation in the reunified German capital at the top of the decade, remains one of rock's most rewarding left turns, a beacon for mid-career bands looking to loosen up and freak out.

Across the record, the Edge trades in his holy guitar chimes for riffs that howl like tornados being sucked down a storm drain. The rhythms are suddenly, surprisingly danceable. Bono floats above the distorted din, moaning and whispering his deepest desires. Doused in black hair dye and shiny leather, the frontman transformed into a sentient oil slick, sending up hoary rock’n’roll clichés while gleefully reveling in them. At this point, the album's surreal, after-hours milieu brings to mind another ’90s touchstone, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, with Bono playing the part of a famous family man trapped between love and lust, faith and folly. Achtung Baby still stands as the sleekest, grooviest, and just plain coolest thing U2 have ever done—a dark night of the soul seen through buggy wraparound shades. –Ryan Dombal

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Bad Boy / Arista

Released 16 days after his murder, Life After Death demonstrates the Notorious B.I.G.'s mastery of seemingly every type of rap music that existed in 1997. If his debut Ready to Die was a gritty, austere New York album, Life After Death is the glossy, maximalist statement, with evermore intricate and subversive flows. He gets luxurious on "Hypnotize" only to step on his enemies’ necks on "Kick in the Door," all of it unfolding on top of Bad Boy's shiny, R&B-inflected production. When it comes to this nearly two-hour double album, the overwhelming sprawl is the point. –Jayson Buford

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Capitol

"Fade Into You," the dreamiest single of the ’90s, broke Mazzy Star through to the charts with its aching beauty. But anybody expecting their full-length to sustain that sense of fragile romance must have been shocked by the disquieting dread that hangs thick over So That Tonight I Might See, a dream-pop album with a gothic core. It plays out in a hallucinogenic swirl: Glimmers of warmth peek through the album's lurching psychedelia, but they’re ephemeral, interrupted by stern, almost contemptuous blues riffs that glare into the distance. The harder you try to make eye contact with these songs, the more pointedly they avert your gaze. –Evan Rytlewski

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Point

Arthur Russell was boundless, iridescent, and unplaceable. The Downtown New York composer and cellist from Iowa worked across styles—disco, folk, experimental, pop, contemporary classical—but every note was charged by the illumination that flowed from his voice and heart, gathered at the fount of his Buddhist practice. His name, largely unknown in his lifetime, is now synonymous with possibility, restlessness, and love. Another Thought was the first compilation of his iconoclastic work following his 1992 death from AIDS. The delicate dissonance and depth of his amplified cello, paired with his sublimely sensitive singing, comes alive on "This Is How We Walk on the Moon," proof he saw the future; "Lucky Cloud," embodying his vision's borderlessness; and "Losing My Taste for the Night Life," an introvert's hymn. It is for good reason that Russell is now an avatar of misunderstood genius. The only comfort is to keep listening as voraciously as Russell did, each song moving, he sings, towards "another thought now." –Jenn Pelly

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Delicious Vinyl / EastWest

With G-funk crumbling pavements in the Wild West, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde offered a breezier boom-bap alternative. The Pharcyde were four knuckleheaded school friends from South Central L.A. who rapped about not getting girls and told "your mama" jokes in verses that could sound drunk and/or helium-high. Add in producer J Swift and his no-such-thing-as-sample-overkill attitude, and you have a madcap concoction that could never have come from any kind of tested recipe. –Dean Van Nguyen

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Island

Before Dolores O’Riordan joined The Cranberries, she listened mainly to traditional Irish music and songs from her Catholic church, where she played the organ. She had never heard of Melody Maker or NME—"All I knew was that I was writing songs and saying what I felt," she later remarked. But it was precisely that unvarnished earnestness—not a naïveté, as the press suggested, but a heartfelt lack of cynicism—that made The Cranberries’ 1993 debut, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, so singularly moving, so unblinkingly sincere, breaking open even the irony-scarred hearts of American college radio snobs.

The Cranberries met O’Riordan's chiming brogue with windswept string arrangements, delicate cymbal hits, and reverb-washed guitars. Listening to their music felt like reading the diary of a wood nymph—ethereal, enchanting, and slightly heartbreaking. But as much as O’Riordan's lyrics define The Cranberries, it's her wordless incantations, like that liberated, warbling cry before the last bridge of "Dreams," that encapsulate their greatest feat: finding freedom, and even joy, in the great unknown. –Arielle Gordon

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EMI Latin

Latinos who grew up in the U.S. have a saying—ni de aquí, ni de allá; neither from here, nor there. Selena, a Latina from Texas, was making music that sounded like and appealed to both sides of the borderlands. And as complicated as her estate has become, or the dark shadow cast by her tragic death, nothing can take away from the impact Amor Prohibido—her final studio release before her 1995 death—had on American culture at large. Amor Prohibido was playful and pleasurable, revelatory and confident as Selena's booming voice detailed male toxicity in greater detail and power than ever before. Through the ’90s balladry of "Si Una Vez" and "No Me Queda Más," and bangers like "El Chico Del Apartamento 512" and "Techno Cumbia," Selena brought cumbia rhythms to mainstream attention. Amor Prohibido remains the best-selling Tejano album of all time, blasting the subgenre to national attention. Most importantly, it's the moment where Selena transcended regional stardom and became American pop royalty. –Gio Santiago

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Reprise

Every decade gets the punk rock it deserves. The brutal imperialism of the ’70s inspired the biting satire of the Dead Kennedys; the ’80s gave us Tipper Gore and, in response, Danzig. But by the ’90s, a decade into the far quieter brutality of Reaganomics and the Moral Majority, punk's targets had become evasive. Absent any obvious villains, what could a teenager in the Oakland suburbs rebel against other than himself?

Dookie, the Bay Area band's major label debut, packaged up their neurotic, goofy, inward-facing jitters as neat, whip-fast pop perfection. Combining Brill Building vocal harmonies and palm-muted power chords, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong made apathy sound apoplectic. From "Burnout"'s disarmingly cheerful descent into total numbness to the bleakly sardonic portrait of urban decay on "Welcome to Paradise," Dookie reached for humor to communicate helplessness. It was a clever sleight-of-hand that allowed Green Day to mask despair with dick jokes. For the downtrodden and the downwardly mobile, masturbating until you lose your mind can feel like rebellion, too. –Arielle Gordon

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Virgin

DJ Premier's trademarked plinky piano loop kicks in seconds into "Work" and you go "uhh"—like, this is an insane oatmeal raisin cookie "uhh"—only for Guru to instantly echo your satisfaction with an "uhh" of his own. "I put in work," he preens, "and watch my status escalate." A quarter century later and 12 years since Guru left the planet, Moment of Truth's status remains undisputed. The 1998 album—Gang Starr's fifth total, and second after Guru's landmark Jazzmatazz teamed him with Dr. Lonnie and Roy Ayers, among others—collects 20 tracks of spare Premier hip-hop beatcraft plus radically refined enunciation from Guru (calling himself "king of monotone," a rare moment of self-deprecation, on the title cut). In the decades since, I’ve mostly listened to instrumentals of these tracks, luxuriating in Premier's jazz snatches and other exotica-tinged samples, and meditating on the void left by Guru's premature death. –Marc Weidenbaum

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Deceptive / DGC

During Britpop's heyday, Elastica were unjustly denied the same respect as peers like Blur and Suede in the powerful British music press. The best bits of "Connection" and "Waking Up"? Just rip-offs of Wire and the Stranglers. The band's initial hype? It was little more than prurient interest in frontwoman Justine Frischmann's love triangle with Blur's Damon Albarn and Suede's Brett Anderson. But Elastica's only real sin was making it all look so easy. Frischmann wrote wry lyrics about car sex, alcohol-fueled erectile dysfunction, and the tedium of making tea, and wrapped them around taut, bouncy hooks that got to the point and moved on. Elastica packs 15 tracks into a spring-loaded 38 minutes; Frischmann told anyone who wanted more to just rewind it. Good advice, then and now. –Jessica Suarez

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Uptown

From the first refrain of her early single "Reminisce," a mournful, sensual ex-sex jam, it was clear Mary J. Blige was not fronting. Her voice was raw with the travails of heartbreak and sounded perfectly imperfect, sidestepping the vocal flawlessness celebrated in R&B by letting emotion lead first—a revolutionary notion in the era of Jodeci's choral masterpieces and Mariah's operatic gymnastics. Her sound, too, signaled an evolution from new jack swing towards a more explicitly intertwined hip-hop and R&B, imbuing it with Blige's emotional resonance and a Bronx-Yonkers vernacular. "Real Love" was a juggernaut that earned her the moniker the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul (initially a Puffy-inspired marketing gambit for radio stations confused by her porous genre lines), but every song on Blige's debut knocked, even the slow jams. She was just 21, cool, and mad New York, embodying tough-girl sexy in oversized jerseys and doorknockers, and her entrance into the pop landscape was a revelation. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

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Drag City

Bill Callahan has said that he intended Knock Knock, the seventh album under his Smog alias, to be a "teenage" album: big riffs, boundless attitude, wildcat and lightning bolt on the cover. Yet the songs, many of which were conceived behind the wheel of his Dodge van as he abandoned South Carolina following a breakup, examined entirely adult feelings and themes like empathy, self-knowledge, and regret. From the romantic promise of the opening "Let's Move to the Country" to the kiss-off of "I Could Drive Forever" and the bruised farewell of the closing "Left Only With Love," Knock Knock is charged with the pleasures and terrors of domestic comforts: budding families, abusive fathers, lonely suburban streets. In fact, the only song explicitly about adolescence, "Teenage Spaceship," is a look back at a moment of serenity that Callahan seems to know he’ll never experience again. But the record's keen-eyed depiction of promise and disappointment—paired with Jim O’Rourke's inventive and exacting production—makes it one of the best in Callahan's catalog. –Philip Sherburne

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City Slang

Forget you’ve ever heard the term "post-rock," and all its associations—windy album titles, yawning orchestral dirges, the word "cinematic." Instead, try thinking of Tortoise's third album, TNT, as the sound of several galaxies on a slow collision course.

In the early ’90s, within the wake of Seattle's grunge boom, at least five Billboard cover stories aimed to position Chicago as a grunge capital to rival the Pacific Northwest's. Bands balked, alliances formed: Men from acts like Slint, Eleventh Dream Day, and Bastro blended with free jazz saxophonists and theatrical no-wavers for a strangely harmonious cosmic phalanx of punk, avant-garde, and jazz, intent on moving as far as possible from alt-rock's earthbound mud. What came next was a strange, inconsistent universe: a constellation of spaghetti Western, Reichian patter, fusion noodling, krautrock locomotion. Skyward and too-much, Tortoise was an evolution—proof of entropy, a will to explore the colder perimeters of space, marginal by definition and design. –Mina Tavakoli

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EMI

Blowout Comb is among the lushest and most sublime of hip-hop albums: Unhurried tempos invite dreamy contemplation, while samples from old jazz records carry fragrant clouds of vibraphone and Fender Rhodes. Floating above the grooves, the deeply musical voices of Ishmael "Butterfly" Butler, Mary Ann "Ladybug Mecca" Vieira, and Craig "Doodlebug" Irving are three points of a perfect triangle, so confident in their message of Black liberation they need never shout. The sonic beauty and effortless style are woven into a complex emotional tapestry—amid joyous odes to the group's Brooklyn home are lines about racist policing, incarcerated heroes, and neglected communities—leading to an album that meets you wherever you are and sounds different every time you put it on. –Mark Richardson

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Parlophone

Drugs and success's pressures rocked much of England's great gay ’80s wave before AIDS did: The Pet Shop Boys nevertheless ascended while others overdosed. But by 1990, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe knew their self-described "imperial phase" of staggering worldwide success was over. So on this, their fourth album, they emphasize elegy over energy, and often symphonic melodies rather than club-centric rhythms. Their drollery is still intact: a former editor of UK pop bible Smash Hits, Tennant takes down smug stars like only he can on "How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?" But what gives the entire project life are the ghosts of countless AIDS fatalities summoned by meticulous analogue synth work overseen by Giorgio Moroder's former collaborator Harold Faltermeyer, particularly on the haunted masterpiece, "Being Boring." For those who survived, "All the people I was kissing/Some are here, and some are missing" remains one of pop's saddest rhymes. –Barry Walters

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Virgin

As French house music started burning up dancefloors in the late ’90s, Moon Safari arrived for everybody who was trying to chill at home near the stereo. Air's Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel made slinky electronics-bolstered lounge music—hookup jams that were at once of their era and an undeniable product of ’70s popular culture. Dainty robot voices sing "Kelly watch the stars" on a wistful track in homage to Jaclyn Smith's Charlie's Angels character; the instrumental "Ce Matin-lá" carries sweeping Bacharach and Love Unlimited Orchestra vibes, while Beth Hirsch's vocals made the songs sound "like a space-age Carpenters," as Godin once put it. It's a bold series of vintage looks, but the duo's earnestness makes Moon Safari camp without caricature. –Evan Minsker

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Reprise

Wilco's 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is widely seen as the fault line dividing their formative roots-rock phase and their more boldly experimental second act, but its 1999 predecessor, Summerteeth, had already demonstrated an equally urgent desire to break free from their past. It's just that, where Yankee infamously deconstructed their sound into dissonance and drones, Summerteeth aspired to be nothing less than the alt-country Pet Sounds. But the album's hair-raising orchestral ascents and Mellotron-swirled luxuriousness can't mask the deep distress in Jeff Tweedy's lyrics—written during a rough patch in his marriage, songs like "She's a Jar" and "Via Chicago" teeter perilously on the edge of where domestic disturbances turn into crime scenes. Today, Summerteeth also stands as a pristine portrait of the troubled relationship between Tweedy and late Wilco co-founder Jay Bennett, before well-documented discord triggered their aesthetic divorce. –Stuart Berman

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Up / Warner Bros.

Built to Spill's most reassuring album, and the last of their trio of consecutive great ones, Keep It Like a Secret comforts like a hug from a friend who doesn't usually do hugs. Band leader Doug Martsch cut through the cynicism of ’90s alt-rock with unabashed earnestness, singing about psyches and bodies buckling under the weight of societal pressures while insisting we’re more than the weight of our adolescent traumas. "Count your blemishes/You can't, they’re all gone," he sings on "Carry The Zero," as guitars cry along. You can be forgiven for joining them. –Evan Rytlewski

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Drag City

At the end of the ’90s, underground music's foremost hyphenate tossed a surprising title onto the dashboard: singer-songwriter. Before Eureka, Jim O’Rourke had played hurdy-gurdy on more tracks than he’d sung lead. Nowadays, there's a sizable audience that associates him not with noise collaborations or guitar experiments but a clutch of exquisitely wrought pop-rock releases from the turn of the century. Warm yet prickly in the rumpled tradition of Harry Nilsson, the album includes allusions to the perilous performance art of Chris Burden, a poignantly faithful Bacharach cover, and finely crafted chamber-pop arrangements played by the cream of Chicago's jazz and indie rock scenes. Guiding it all are the steady hands of O’Rourke, who can set a cello and steel pan to dance, or make a shaker sound meditative. –Brad Shoup

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Warner Bros.

Few records have fundamentally shifted the trajectory of a band's career as The Soft Bulletin did for the Flaming Lips. Nine albums and 16 years into their existence, The Soft Bulletin redirected these presumed one-hit wonders from the cut-out bin to the top line on the festival poster, transforming an irreverent fuzz-rock band into deeply philosophical emissaries of circus-sized orchestral spectacle, nun puppet and all.

But while it's impossible to hear the opening drum strike of "Race for the Prize" without picturing exploding confetti cannons and human-sized plastic bubbles, The Soft Bulletin's breathtaking symphonic-rock rapture is ultimately a function of escapist fantasia crashing into cold, hard truths. Spinning real-life stories of drug addiction and the loss of parents into sweetly sung, wondrous fables, the album remains an indispensable support system for dealing with the problems and stresses that await us outside the venue once all that confetti gets swept up. –Stuart Berman

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Virgin

In the video for "Today," Smashing Pumpkins’ breakthrough single, Billy Corgan stars as a dorky ice cream man who reads comic books and imagines sexy couples making out all around him. He is by far the least cool-looking person in the clip, and that's the point. With their second album, the Chicago quartet dive-bombed into a rock era defined by rawness and DIY humility armed with guitar-god solos, drum theatrics, and production that made every second of the 62-minute opus sound as pristine as the Hope Diamond. Siamese Dream was an alternative to punk piety, and it soon became an alt-rock blueprint for generations to come.

Throughout the record, Corgan coos and sneers as he works through troubling childhood memories and suicidal depression, his trauma turning triumphant when matched with so many squealing riffs. "Life's a drag!" he sings, smearing the last word across five ecstatic syllables, and making human existence sound like a bummer that's very much worth living. –Ryan Dombal

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Jive

Faced with the task of following up 1991's classic The Low End Theory, A Tribe Called Quest responded by adding just the right touches of conceptual breadth and subtle innovation. From its multiple album cover designs celebrating a community of (literal) hip-hop heads to its playful, proto-Siri interludes, Midnight Marauders positioned Tribe as unifiers and humanizers amid modern life's estrangements.

The record was at turns thoughtful (the N-word defense language discourse "Sucka Nigga") and self-deprecating ("8 Million Stories," a comical chronicle of mundane struggles), but it most dominantly emoted joy. Across a dazzling boom-bap production-scape that merged Blue Note, original school breaks, and Quiet Storm classics, Q-Tip and Phife sounded ebullient, their vocal chemistry offering a comprehensive study in abstract/wisecrack interplay. From statements of purpose like "Award Tour" to the ecstatic rhyme exercise "Lyrics to Go" to the bawdy pick-up lines of "Electric Relaxation," the pair exuded comradery and affection. It was Tribe's true love movement. –Jeff Mao

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Shock

Primal Scream made it all sound far too easy on Screamadelica, whose combination of classic songwriting and electronic production left an early high-water mark for forward-thinking rock music in the 1990s. Listening to the Scottish group's third LP, it seemed only natural that house, blues, soul, dub, ambient, rave, and psychedelic rock should come together in 65 minutes of joyful music; it seemed somehow right that a gang of MC5-obsessed rockers on their critical uppers should create a work of ecstasy-blasted euphoria that provided the Day-Glo yin to Nirvana's turbulent yang. The results were the epitome of unfettered musical instinct, as Primal Scream and their motley crew (including producer/DJ Andrew Weatherall, ambient-house pioneers the Orb, singer Denise Johnson, former PiL bass player Jah Wobble, and Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller) powered through the history of modern music and into the future, operating on inspiration and too many early mornings. Its ragtag bag of influences meant Screamadelica sounded a lot like many people, but no one sounded quite like Screamadelica, an album both perfectly of its time and light years ahead of the rock/dance curve. –Ben Cardew

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Priority

No Jheri curl, no mercy. Over molten funk and soul loops, Ice Cube spends Death Certificate accosting every American person, demographic, and structure that he sees as an impediment to Black power. The concept album—divided into a death side mirroring the times and a life side imagining an improved future—is fiendishly specific and textured, gangster rap as sworn deposition and apocalyptic fever dream.

When Los Angeles exploded in protest the following year over the acquittals of three LAPD officers who brutalized Rodney King, Death Certificate's caustic verses evoking fiery Black insurrection proved prophetic. But the album's urgent mood relies on tension as well as outright flamethrowing. Cube plays both storyteller and polemicist, couching the threats to burn it all down in slow-building narratives set in hospital waiting rooms, jail cells, and Korean-owned package stores. As he brings these locales to life with humor, wit, and irritation alongside rage, the album reveals itself to be more testament than manifesto—one rapper's constant proximity to death informing an unapologetic vision of life. –Stephen Kearse

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Trauma / Interscope

Gwen Stefani's heartbreak became No Doubt's glory, fueling the SoCal ska-pop group's powerhouse third album, Tragic Kingdom. The soon-to-be-iconic frontwoman wrote her way through a breakup with the band's bassist, Tony Kanal, resulting in a series of hits that juxtaposed her pain with frolicking rhythms and liberal explorations of ska, disco, and new wave. But it was "Just a Girl," the album's snarky wink of a lead single—with muscular, looping guitar from Tom Dumont backing Stefani's affected warble—that captured the feminist attitude of the time and helped them conquer the mainstream. With Tragic Kingdom, No Doubt seemed to ask: What if, instead of crying over all that hurt, you could kick the door down, throw one helluva party, and skank your way better? –Amanda Wicks

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DGC

Listening to Odelay is like watching a Vegas revue made from the trash we left behind. He's karaoke country, he's toy-commercial rap, he's rhinestone-studded soul. You get the sense Beck is having fun with it, but also that he's lost in translation: After all, "I’ve got a devil's haircut in my mind" doesn't make sense no matter how passionately you scream it.

As much as the album captured the eclecticism of mid-’90s bohemia, it also glimpsed the attention-deficient moment to come. This is music that came out before most people had cell phones, when the internet came from a plug in the wall. Where early hip-hop had used sampling and collage to bring disparate sounds together, Odelay created a feeling of almost perpetual dislocation, but also of wonder: The lights that keep flashing and the pings that keep pinging whether you know where they’re coming from or not. –Mike Powell

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Wax Trax!

Autechre's second album soothes with one hand and abrades with the other. The comforting touch makes the irritant all the more effective; there's so much warm bathwater flowing over your skin that you don't realize it's being sanded away. The Manchester electronic duo released Amber on Warp as the label entered its most emblematic era, when albums from Aphex Twin, Nightmares on Wax, and Boards of Canada would pinch UK dance music into a tight, heady corner. The record taught successive generations of hyperfocused sound sculptors that you didn't need more than a handful of off-the-shelf tools to render lurid, immersive environments; that nausea could feed pleasure rather than upend it; that with enough patience, fertilizer, and poison, impossible landscapes can grow. –Sasha Geffen

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DGC

Mainstream pop culture was not always so obsessed with superheroes and nerds named Sheldon; for many years, rock stars were insatiable creatures, not insecure dorks. Weezer leader Rivers Cuomo wasn't single-handedly responsible for this shift, but his bespectacled presence from 1994 onward was like a flare to the sky for rock geeks everywhere. The wholesomeness of the first and greatest of Weezer's color-coded eponymous albums—from the Beach Boys harmonies and X-Men lyrics to the Happy Days-inspired "Buddy Holly" video coming preloaded on Windows 95—is matched by a sour note, upon closer listening. You can hear it in the ultra-crisp hard-rock riffs, the loud-soft dynamic cribbed from the Pixies, and most of all, the record's animating tension, between crushing vulnerability and uncomfortable jokes about the opposite sex (if released today, someone would surely call it an incel classic). This is the dream-shame space of kids who fear the rules but long to break them, of boys and girls who feel rejected before they even try, and it is one of the most powerful forces that can propel a modern guitar record. No wonder Blue and its even more curdled follow-up, 1996's Pinkerton, became classics of third-wave emo and sensitive indie rock alike. –Jill Mapes

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Epic Street

Ghostface Killah recorded Ironman in a burst of uneasy adrenaline, fresh off the incarceration of his best friend and a frightening diabetes diagnosis. The fact that he's never been happy with the result—"deadlines will fuck you up," he told Okayplayer in 2021, on occasion of the album's 25th anniversary—only testifies to the impossibility of confining the splatter of his unruly mind to one canvas. Without the Al Green flips on "Iron Maiden" and "260" or the sunlit Jackson 5 sample on "All That I Got Is You," there would be no soul loops as rap fans understand them today—a young Kanye West cited Ghostface as the originator of his style, and made the beats for The Blueprint with him in mind. Without Ghostface's furry Kangols and two-toned Wallabees, Cam’ron would have never worn pink or driven a Laffy Taffy-colored Range Rover; without the comic-book style lettering on the front, a young Daniel Dumile would have never donned the mask to become MF DOOM. Ghost's influence spread so wide in part because he felt so human and touchable. In a group of rough shouters, he raised his voice in anxiety as often as in anger, and he remains the only Wu member capable of making you weep for him, as he did on the Mary J. Blige-assisted "All That I Got Is You." He would refine his bugged-out panoramas on 2000's Supreme Clientele, but Ironman injected the first operatic note into gangsta rap, and it's trembled with strange, ungovernable emotions ever since. –Jayson Greene

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Axiom

Even in jazz, singularity can be a burden. With asthma precluding him from the sax, Sonny Sharrock bent and hammered his guitar strings to sound like the tenor players he worshiped. The style he developed in the ’60s—which sometimes suggested the sound of someone forging a sword out of lava—made him an odd fit in a scene that had tilted from free jazz toward fusion. He bowed out in the mid ’70s but emerged a decade later, his gifts fully appreciated and intact.

His last release before his death at 53, Ask the Ages was the culmination of this comeback: a taut, modern set showcasing his tonal and compositional abilities. He recruited two key figures from John Coltrane's spiritual-jazz era, drummer Elvin Jones and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and set them loose on prickly modal slouches, skronky workouts, and some of his stickiest melodies: "Who Does She Hope to Be?" is a candidate for the most plaintive ballad—in any genre—of the decade. –Brad Shoup

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DGC

When Sonic Youth signed with major label DGC for their 1990 album Goo, some feared they had abandoned the underground. As if. Goo takes the destructive bliss defined by its predecessor Daydream Nation and sharpens it—but only a smidge. The resulting songs are some of their finest, from the warped "Dirty Boots" to Kim Gordon's devastating tribute to Karen Carpenter, "Tunic (Song for Karen)." As usual, Sonic Youth were ahead of the curve: One year later, punk would break and every major label would invest in alternative bands that they hoped could crash the charts. (For their part, DGC crossed their fingers that an album called Nevermind would match the sales of Goo.) But few bands ever "sold out" and remained as untouchably cool as Sonic Youth. –Quinn Moreland

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BIGTIME

DJ Screw was an effortless curator of vibes, an intuitive conductor of rhythm and a notorious workaholic known for his nocturnal habits and nonstop hustle. The basics of chopped and screwed are simple: two copies of the same record are slowed down side-by-side, with one track a beat behind the other to create the stuttering "chopped" rhythm. But Screw was a turntablist wizard before he ever slowed music down, and there's an electric unpredictability to his mixing that never resorts to formula. 3 ’N the Mornin’ Part Two is one of Screw's signature works not just because it was one of the few retail projects he released during his lifetime, but because it's such a vivid time capsule of Texas rap—essentially, an extended studio session with local legends like Lil’ Keke, Big Moe, and Point Blank. In the years since, his music has spread from the trunk speakers of Houston to the earbuds of the world, passed along like folklore through burned CDs and zip files, revived by Drake samples and Megan Thee Stallion freestyles and the Moonlight soundtrack, summoned by every kid making vaporwave remixes in their bedroom. But there's no mistaking homage for the original—it's only screwed if Robert Earl Davis made it. –Nadine Smith

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Dedicated

In Jason Pierce's musical quest to hit as many pleasure receptors as real heroin, the high has never been more pure and terrible than on Spiritualized's 1997 masterpiece. Painstakingly constructed from performances by the band, a string quartet, a gospel choir, and Dr. John, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space blurs shoegaze sleep paralysis into full-throated gospel deliverance into lullaby harmonica blues. The noise burns like a sunspot, the light at the end of a tunnel stretching from the first church bell chime of the title track to the decaying ebb of "Cop Shoot Cop…," the ultimate comedown. Never duplicated, Ladies and Gentlemen is an album of bared teeth and tender romantic underbelly, a secret password to the hearts of the surliest old heads in indie rock. –Anna Gaca

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Constellation / Kranky

Upon first listen, you might mistake Godspeed You! Black Emperor's first album of chilling and expansive post-rock for an apocalyptic prophecy intercepted from an extraterrestrial frequency. "We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine/And the machine is bleeding to death," the narrator of "Dead Flag Blues" states in a deadpan growl. But for each foreboding drone, there's a glimmer of hope: jubilant glockenspiel, wistful bagpipes, the crashing drums halfway through "Providence." GY!BE were not only interested in illustrating our broken world, but also in radicalizing listeners to do something about it. Like the penny flattened by passing trains that comes with each vinyl copy—a symbol of the force needed to bend and break capitalism—F♯ A♯ ∞ is both a warning and an inspiration. –Nina Corcoran

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LaFace

ATLiens is simultaneously an excavation into the city of OutKast's childhood and a farewell to it. It is a solemn ruin of cross streets, landmarks, aggrieved ballads, and defensive young men talking past one another. Its muted funk licks and fathomless basslines are transmissions from a subterranean bunker, or, if you prefer, deep space. The slow contemplation yields intricate characters—dour pimps, half-aware caricatures, backwoods philosophers. Yet the miracle of ATLiens lies in its digression. "Babylon," for instance, is at once a graphic account of Andre 3000's sexual history and a heartfelt tribute to Big Boi's late aunt. This yin and yang would prove OutKast's undoing, but on ATLiens it makes for a fascinatingly humane dialogue, creative partners maintaining brilliant correspondence while failing to meet one another's eyes. –Pete Tosiello

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Touch and Go

Spiderland is the loudest quiet record of the ’90s, a harrowing experience of psychic despair and physical desolation whose impact was as significant as its record sales were fallow. (To tweak the old saying, less than 10,000 people bought a copy but every one of them started a post-rock band.) The members of Slint were four regular guys from Louisville, Kentucky, prone to goofs and pranks—that they made such a profoundly bleak record characterized by negative space and brooding contemplation speaks to the mundanity of depression and its unbreakable hold on the spirit. As the story goes, singer Brian McMahan checked himself into a psychiatric hospital the morning after recording was finished. His vocals toggle between plaintive spoken word and pained howls, as David Pajo's guitar lines stretch and wobble like power lines swaying in the wind. The songs are beyond summary, because to say that "Good Morning, Captain" is about missing someone is to say that Moby Dick is about going fishing. Thirty years after it reshaped rock music with the potential to create an unknowable atmosphere, Spiderland is still a portal to a haunted America where ghosts lurk in every forgotten crevice. –Jeremy Gordon

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Monument

The Chicks begin Fly, their fifth album, by running from love, and they end it ready to say goodbye to a relationship that can't be fixed. Heralded by Natalie Maines’ twangy yelps and pace-quickening arrangements of banjo, violin, and guitar, the trio fight against domestic standards, instead painting relationships with men as dangerous, limiting, and boring. "Goodbye Earl," which tells the story of two best friends who murder an abusive ex and then start a farm together, is Fly's emotional centerpiece: a snarling, intensely funny quest for justice and a celebration of the safety found in bonds with other women. Their desire to find wild and unruly love shines through, but often as a means for self actualization rather than yearning for any particular person. Fly laid the groundwork for the group's more explicitly political era, too: These were women who honored their truest desires and paid no attention to what others wanted from them. –Vrinda Jagota

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Parlophone

Between the grunge pastiche of Pablo Honey and the outsize art-rock of OK Computer, The Bends arrived as an unlikely milestone for Britpop and for Radiohead itself. The band worked with mainstay producer Nigel Godrich for the first time, and Thom Yorke blew his previous songwriting out of the water, signaling a visionary future. Some of the quintet's most reliable traits emerged: stadium-singalong balladry; cryptic lyrics about capitalist dread, artificiality, and paranoia; deceptively complex guitar lines that could split the ground open or gorgeously float through space and time; Yorke's unmistakable falsetto. Radiohead managed to expand upon this framework en route to most acclaimed rock catalog of the past 30 years because the template was so undeniable. –Max Freedman

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Kill Rock Stars

Using hardcore's aggression for unapologetic feminist expression, riot grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill kicked down the door of the patriarchy and male-dominated punk scenes. Their song "Rebel Girl," in which frontwoman Kathleen Hanna declares her devotion to "the queen of the neighborhood" who embodies the revolution, became the undisputed riot grrrl anthem after the release of the band's studio debut Pussy Whipped in October 1993. But the band brought their older music to the front on this 1994 LP, unequivocally affirming for a new global audience that their revolution was far more than a one-off battle cry. Songs like "Suck My Left One," about defiance in the face of incest, and "White Boy," a white-hot rage against sexual assault ("I can not scream from pain down here on my knees/I’m so sorry that I think!"), went in hard and intensified Bikini Kill's unrelenting message. –Evie Nagy

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Def Jam

Amid the frenzied mourning that erupted in New York City following DMX's tragic passing last year, it was easy to forget that Earl Simmons had once seemed like a lost cause, passed over by Bad Boy for the more bankable LOX after early single "The Born Loser" flopped at Columbia. But this trial by failure proved to be his salvation. By the time Def Jam gave him a shot, DMX was a 27-year-old vet who wasn't about to take his second chance for granted.

It's Dark and Hell Is Hot is a chilling, introspective debut album that laid waste to the shiny suit era by cashing in on X's hard-won vantage point. "Ruff Ryders Anthem"'s bruising clarion call sets the stage for an odyssey through a man's fractured soul, one that can cook up Faustian bargains ("Damien") while playing God's ventriloquist as self-therapy ("The Convo"), preach a gospel of retribution ("Get at Me Dog"), and bask in everlasting forgiveness ("Prayer"). It's a toast to a new king as he sits atop a throne of blood. –Phillipe Roberts

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Merge

After Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, but before Sufjan Stevens promised to write an album after every state, the most ambitious music project known to indie heads was 69 Love Songs. The album delivers exactly what the title says, styled as cowboy ballads, folk songs, synth pieces, and countless other genres, all tied together with Stephin Merritt's devastatingly clever lyrics. Merritt has maintained that it's not an album about love, but about love songs—devotional, yes, but only to the tropes of the genre. He's a scholar of pop music, and Love Songs is his thesis. But all of that is easy to forget once immersed in the world of the album itself, which is endlessly generous with its vignettes and listeners alike. They wouldn't be love songs if they didn't charm us off our feet, waltz us through familiar scenes which suddenly feel eye-openingly new, and leave us swooning—even when we think we should know better. –NM Mashurov

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MCA

If Things Fall Apart was Questlove's idea of going pop, then the Roots drummer and bandleader's vision of commercial appeal was so rich and multi-faceted that just about anything could qualify. The Philadelphia hip-hop group's fourth album boasts one of the most breathtaking ballads of the neo-soul era they helped guide, "You Got Me," a Jill Scott co-write that overflows with bittersweet strings, a serene Erykah Badu chorus, and the brash introduction of Philly rapper Eve. But as you might expect from a record named after the seminal Chinua Achebe novel, it's also some rigorously heady stuff, bookended by dialogue from Spike Lee's Mo’ Better Blues and a graphic spoken-word poem. And with dual MCs Black Thought and Malik B. trading verses with their usual improvisatory verve, joined by such formidable verbal sparring opponents as Mos Def and Common, it's closer to an old-school rap battle than the personality-driven myth-making that was then crossing over from the hip-hop charts. Still: take one listen to the loopy flows of the J Dilla-produced "Dynamite!," and Things Fall Apart sounds like—if not pop exactly—then the impressionistic shape of art-pop to come. –Marc Hogan

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KLF Communications

As a creation story for the ’90s, Chill Out has it all. Emerging in the first months of the decade from a British rave scene approaching its apogee, this sublime suite of anti-music was all about appropriation—a quintessential ’90s methodology. From its origins in a contested DJ collaboration to its majestic tapestry woven from samples of Tuvan throat singers, BBC jingles, and bursts of Fleetwood Mac and Van Halen, the record exalted the gathering obsession with musical borrowing (aka theft) in late 20th century pop. But aside from its situationist hijinks, the KLF's most listenable album also sounded—quite literally—like a dream. The cornerstone of an entire genre, Chill Out's hypnagogic fantasy of a twilight trawl across the Deep South established the gold standard for early-hours comedown music—one only rarely matched in the decades since. –Alex Niven

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DGC

By 1993, Kurt Cobain was ailing from chronic stomach pain, exacerbated by a poor diet and his scoliosis, which he treated unsuccessfully with heroin. In February of that year, In Utero wasn't so much made as it was purged from Nirvana's digestive tract, tasting of copper and smelling of offal. Recorded live in a Minnesota studio by Steve Albini in a two-week sprint, the album was in exercise in rejection: of the glossy sound of Nevermind, of Nirvana's sudden fame, of bodily organs, of life in general. Cobain sang about kissing open sores, eating cancer, anemia, milk, shit, umbilical nooses—an undigested litany that hints that his pain was much more of his body than in his mind. The singer's vocal cords sound either lightly sandpapered or heavily scalpelled, recorded without any overdubs. He is alternately angry, sarcastic, spiritual, caustic, wearing his heart on his sleeve only because he's turned his body inside out for all to see. –Jeremy D. Larson

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It didn't take much for Missy Elliott and Timbaland to rewrite the visual and aural rules of hip-hop with 1997's Supa Dupa Fly. An inflated garbage bag jumpsuit, a universe of celestial, serrated beats, and a love of the eccentric. Timbaland's mosaic production style—often spacious, with room for a chorus of crickets, some beatboxing, or masterfully placed soul samples—were the ideal foundation for Missy's ruminations on fuckboys, booty calls, and heartache. With staccato raps and catchy flows, Elliott struck a perfect balance between romantic vulnerability and self-assured flexing, an approach that felt like uncharted territory within a world that hypersexualized women. The album also assembled late ’90s R&B and rap luminaries like Lil’ Kim, Busta Rhymes, and Aaliyah, showcasing an industry in transition. At the moment of hip-hop's commercial surge, this pair of Afrofuturists was envisioning how the genre could stretch its imagined boundaries in the new millennium. The fact that it only took two weeks in the studio to bring Supa Dupa Fly to life is just further proof of the depth of the duo's prescient vision. –Isabelia Herrera

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Matador

This was not Yo La Tengo's first great album, nor their second, but it marked the first time that they were so great in so many different ways at once. While the New Jersey indie trio had by this point perfected the connection between close-mic intimacy and freakout solos, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One shows them brimming with ideas, including sample-punctured meditations ("Moby Octopad"), tightened-up pop ("Stockholm Syndrome"), and dialogues between ambient crickets and a slide guitar ("Green Arrow"). The album is as quiet and gentle as a winter snowfall, as loud and electric as a spring thunderstorm, as free and fun as a summer bike ride, and as durable and dependable as, yes, the world's best autumn sweater. –Steven Arroyo

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Tommy Boy / Warner Bros.

A fraught follow-up to their irresistibly confectionary debut, 1991's De La Soul Is Dead is a sui-generis act of ingenious world building and uneasy vibes. Its closest antecedent in music history could be Sly and the Family Stone's 1971 landmark There's a Riot Goin’ On, which likewise evinced newly formed skepticism regarding utopian ideals while exhibiting a thrillingly novel sonic palette. The two groups’ migration from optimistic self-determination to anguished acknowledgement of an insurmountable power structure roughly traces the tortured start-and-stop trajectory of every consequential American liberation movement, and the blood is all over these tracks. From the self-negating album title to the skittering don't-fuck-with-us-’cause-you-think-we’re-hippies warnings of "Please Porridge" to the infectious but spiritually wobbly "Keepin’ the Faith," De La Soul Is Dead is the sound of a group taking inventory of their early success with pronounced wariness and a vaulting sense of musical adventure. –Elizabeth Nelson

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Island

At age 16, Jarvis Cocker drew up an ambitious manifesto for his new band, then called Arabicus Pulp: "The group shall work its way into the public eye by producing fairly conventional, yet slightly offbeat, pop songs [...] then begin to subvert and restructure both the music business and music itself." Nearly two decades later, the frontman and his group did manage to capture the attention of the masses via Different Class, a full-length that alchemized bubblegum, glam, and luxe new wave into artful pop preoccupied with social divisions and furtive couplings. Anchoring it all is "Common People," the stinging insta-anthem about a sculpture student slumming it with a normie, that got Pulp to No. 2 on the UK charts. The album may not have upended the record industry at large, but it did illuminate a path forward for the band's fellow mis-shapes, mistakes, and misfits. –Robert Ham

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Matador

Pavement weren't the only early-’90s band that turned noise into something like pop—Nirvana and Sonic Youth did the same—but the low-key charm of Slanted and Enchanted felt different. Whatever angst they might’ve felt was sublimated by a bookishness and sense of grandeur that made even their feedback seem sweet. In an unearthed 1982 high school newspaper profile on singer Stephen Malkmus, he's pictured in lacrosse gear, looking dreamily toward the horizon under the headline "Athletics, punk band occupy Malkmus’ time." The jocks, the nerds, the freaks—maybe it wasn't as simple as The Breakfast Club made it seem.

The title comes from the poet Emily Dickinson: "Tell all the truth/but tell it slant." They sound like boys but their mystery runs deep. To gentle hearts inspired by punk's freedom but wigged out by its intensity, they served as proof that not every revolution demands a fight. –Mike Powell

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Geffen

Staten Island is lonely. Time moves slower; the winter feels a little more frigid than in Brooklyn or Jersey; the limited ways to get off the island sometimes make you feel like you’re trapped. More so than any other Wu-Tang Clan album, group or solo, Liquid Swords is Staten Island's. GZA's still, quiet, and grim nature captures the mood of a borough that feels like exile. The bedrock is made of dark and brooding beats—with the R&B samples stripped of all color, it's arguably the greatest production work of RZA's hot streak. All the Wu members are here, but their larger than life personalities are reserved without being muted, handing over the centerstage to GZA's pensive, dense, and descriptive rhymes. Bullets hit first floor window panes and bust up dice games on "Cold World"; the world-building on "Hell's Wind Staff/Killah Hills 10304" is full of imagination as the song gradually builds from drug-dealing in real-life New York City locations to a Narcos plot. The album is lined with clips from the bleak 1980 samurai flick Shogun Assassin, where blood sprays and battles are treated like an inevitability. At a time when the Wu solo records were from the roughhousing, quotable, and larger-than-life personalities like Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Raekwon, the gravity of Liquid Swords pulled rap into a new orbit. –Alphonse Pierre

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Columbia

Motorcycle crashes and crashed marriages, spiritual awakenings and amphetamine escapades: Despite rounds of severe real-life turmoil, Bob Dylan had never gone four years without releasing new music, at least until the late ’90s. Nearing 60, was he done? Time Out of Mind suggests he wondered that very thing. An album of bedrock existential doubt and loneliness so pervasive that death itself seems the only cure, this is a Dylan record without precedent or parallel, blues draped across his back like a translucent mourning shroud, as if he were sitting shiva for himself. In a humid Miami studio, producer Daniel Lanois conducted a sterling band of multiple drummers and keyboardists, shaping the eerie haze through which this Dylan-in-doubt could drift. "There's not even room enough to be anywhere," he grumbles during a song about making one's own deathbed. He was wrong: No other ’90s album by Dylan's aging peers invented a new space for its maker like these 11 haunted beauties. –Grayson Haver Currin

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Capitol

After their skull-snapping 1989 sample-go-‘round Paul's Boutique flopped, the Beastie Boys wiped the slate clean. Michael Diamond, Adam Horovitz, and Adam Yauch set up shop in their Los Angeles headquarters (complete with skateboard ramp and basketball court) and started jamming on the instruments they had put down when they left hardcore punk behind. Inspired by the funk classics they had been mining for samples, they set out to create some grooves of their own. "A lot of the theory was, let's make a record that's like the dope break parts," said Diamond. The blend of punk, funk, and hip-hop on Check Your Head—from the fuzzed-out, stuttery hit "So What’Cha Want" to a Biz Markie guest spot to a blistering cover of Sly Stone's "Time for Livin’"—established the archetypally ’90s skate-rap-rock aesthetic. And on soul-searching songs like "Gratitude" and "Stand Together," the Beastie Boys’ startling transformation from superbrats to enlightened activists had begun. –Alan Light

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Matador

Chan Marshall wrote all of her fourth record as Cat Power in one evening while living in a barn with fellow songwriter Bill Callahan, and it plays like a summer thunderstorm in the middle of nowhere. At the time, Marshall was under pressure and about to give up on music, and you can hear that urgency, that weariness. Moon Pix is primarily a tempestuous, feel-bad listen: It's 4 a.m., stumbling drunk, drop-your-keys-on-the-front-porch shit. Her bleariness on a song like "Metal Heart" is palpable; the shuffling drum machine loop on "American Flag" can't help but make your soul grow tired. On Moon Pix, Marshall sings like she has to, like it's the only way she can make you understand how she's feeling. And she does. –Sophie Kemp

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Fondle 'Em

In 1994, after his brother's sudden death and the cancellation of his group's album due to its controversial cover, a dejected Daniel Dumile disappeared into the streets of New York City. He resurfaced years later at Nuyorican Poets Cafe, wearing a stocking over his face and performing a new song called "Doomsday," in which he announced his new, villainous mission "to destroy rap." Soon, Dumile would ditch the stocking for a metal mask and fully assume his new form: MF DOOM. On his debut album, DOOM drew himself as a self-effacing, mentally disturbed outcast who was hell-bent on seeking revenge on the industry that forced him to hide his face. His absurdism was evident in his punchlines and his production, filled with Scooby-Doo grunts, offbeat drums, and beat drops that acted like comedic rimshots, but DOOM also conveyed tenderness through R&B flips and diaristic lyrics about his late brother. Operation: Doomsday didn't destroy the rap industry; instead, it paved the way for fellow villainous weirdos to flourish. –Arjun Srivatsa

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Island

Tricky's debut album, Maxinquaye, hit No. 3 in the UK album chart and helped spawn a genre—trip-hop—that became synonymous with bourgeois lifestyle music. Yet listening back today, it still sounds more jarring than that legacy would suggest. An unholy fusion of soul, hip-hop, and the soundsystem heritage of Tricky's native Bristol, the album's largely languid pacing conceals an undercurrent of dark, chaotic energy. There is torrid sex ("Suffocated Love"), occult rap ("Hell Is Round the Corner"), even a sample of Smashing Pumpkins’ "Suffer" spun into curdled bliss ("Pumpkin"). A cover of Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" is sung insouciantly by Tricky's muse and romantic partner Martina Topley-Bird atop a bed of full-tilt heavy metal. Tricky himself is largely a phantom presence, directing affairs from the shadows. But where their voices intertwine—hers a sultry blues cry, his a husky, smoked-out whisper—it feels almost indecent. –Louis Pattison

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Warner Bros.

No band did more to establish the idea of "college rock" and the indie rock ethos than R.E.M. As a young group of Georgia sweeties, the band steadily built a devoted following while rejecting any commercial maneuvers that could sacrifice their artistic drive. When their sound and distribution leverage finally intersected with the mainstream, 1991's Out of Time made them superstars. But a year later, it was Automatic for the People that set R.E.M. up for immortality.

It's ironic, then, that many at the time suspected that frontman Michael Stipe was nearing his end. His gaunt appearance and indeterminate sexuality fueled false rumors that he was dying of AIDS, bolstered by the new album's sublime grappling with nostalgia, depression, and death. Heart-gripping ballads including "Drive," "Nightswimming," and "Everybody Hurts" were made richer in both tragedy and hope by stirring string arrangements from former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Anything but a last gasp, Automatic for the People breathed powerful life into R.E.M.'s ascent for decades to come. –Evie Nagy

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Universal / Cash Money

400 Degreez stands as the ultimate Mannie Fresh production—a sweaty, irresistible ride through the sights and sounds of New Orleans’ Third Ward. The beatmaker always excelled at squeezing the soul and funk out of programmed drums and keyboards, but his partnership with Juvenile—a mealy-mouthed, melodic rapper from the Magnolia Projects—resulted in a mélange of bounce and rap that was darker and more viscous than anything he’d done before. Juvenile would come to Mannie with fully written verses, and Mannie would make beats on the spot that molded to his cadences. The effect is music and voice in total symbiosis: See the album's masterpiece, "Ha," where Juvenile's talky flow dips in and out of Mannie's groove, a rhythm inside a rhythm. –Mano Sundaresan

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Wild Bunch / Virgin

In the decade leading up to Blue Lines, Bristol was home to reggae soundsystems, post-punk bohemians, and some of the UK's earliest converts to hip-hop. Massive Attack emerged from this ferment of overlapping undergrounds. The group's core of 3D, Daddy G, Mushroom, and Tricky were crate-digging DJs and MCs who’d grown up on 2-Tone and post-punk, and chose to rap using the faltering phrasing of English speech patterns rather than pretend to be American. They were inventing a new archetype of the meditative MC, a British homegrown mode that would blossom with Tricky's solo album Maxinquaye, the street-level reveries of Mike Skinner, and Dizzee Rascal's more introspective moments. But while the mumbled flows, samples, and scratching identify Blue Lines as hip-hop, the album's scope is expansive, embracing soul and reggae with achingly melodic contributions from Shara Nelson and Horace Andy, and nodding to the grandeur of film scores and jazz fusion. Rolling at a languid 90 BPM—or slower—Blue Lines reflects the spliff-tempo metabolism of Bristol's stoners. Massive were hardly slackers, though; ambitiously conceived and immaculately achieved, the landmark Blue Lines mapped out directions that would define the British ’90s and reverberate to this day. –Simon Reynolds

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Columbia

Fueled by the tantric edging of an extramarital liaison and the pleasure of "finally getting a shot of good Vitamin D," as she cheekily put it in her memoir, Butterfly is Mariah Carey at 28, reawakened by "breathless and fervid" love affairs, as well as a post-divorce freedom to fully embrace Black genres in her music and write from the heart. She is a babydoll with a tear-soaked pillow; a sexy-ass vixen; a technician and a tone poet. Few but Carey can sing "My All" on a technical level, but Butterfly rarely feels like vocal showboating; her voice weaves textural tapestries over in the cut R&B, and she takes audible pleasure in her instrument's elasticity. Particularly heavenly is the five-song hang suite at Butterfly's center, a showcase for the strength she finds in vulnerable sensuality, as well as sympatico with peers like Mobb Deep and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony—collaborators she lavishes in layers of harmony like tweezed gold leaf. –Owen Myers

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Priority / Roc-A-Fella

A quarter century later, it's hard to see JAY-Z as anything but the lordly figure he has become, but his first album is a reminder that nothing about him or his success was inevitable. Inspired by Nas’ Illmatic, the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Trenton, New Jersey high school dropout and drug dealer crafted some of the most crushing tales of poverty, hustling, and street politics in hip-hop history on Reasonable Doubt. The street details are intricate and vivid. The hustler aspires to the big time, but he's not quite dreaming of a mogul's life. He takes his wages to Vegas—to bet against Mike Tyson—so he can get a break on his taxes. He buys the whole car and never leases. This is the good life as imagined by someone balanced on the edge between making it and oblivion. –Jayson Buford

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Creation

By the time frontman Neil Halstead turned up to record Slowdive's second album, with his iconic shaggy hair shorn off after a "bad acid experience," it was already clear that the group, once heralded as a boundary-pushing act in the nascent shoegaze scene, was in crisis. Halstead's relationship with bandmate Rachel Goswell was unraveling, the British music press were beginning to use the group as a punching bag, and Alan McGee, head of their label Creation Records, openly disliked their new songs. Emotions were raw, but that's always where Slowdive thrive.

Souvlaki has since become a touchstone for virtually every reverb-clouded, feelings-forward act that has come in its wake. Part of the power of these songs has to do with their uncomfortable closeness: The Halstead-sung acoustic closer "Dagger" is so intimate that Goswell had a hard time listening to it for years. But even amid all that heaviness, the music still manages to float above—an attractive notion, then and now. –Colin Joyce

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RCA / Loud

It's strange to think now that Prodigy and Havoc had already been dropped by their label before making The Infamous, as a commercially dead debut record and the explosion of their Queensbridge peer Nas had sent Mobb Deep skidding to the gutter. But it was precisely from this gloom that their perfectly formed second LP would emerge. There's storytelling here that Davids Chase and Simon would admire, along with one-liners and street aphorisms that have punctured and filtered through pop culture ever since. (Just try to find a lyric catchier or more visceral than "Rock you in your face, stab your brain with your nose bone.") Perhaps the only thing to top the pair's relentless lyricism is the sampling—so delicate and precise, yet rough edged, crackling, and endlessly intriguing. There's a minute-long YouTube video breaking down the piano sample on "Shook Ones Pt. II" that's been watched millions of times since it was posted in 2011. It took years for anyone to figure out how Havoc did it in the first place; even now, knowing how he pulled it off can't explain its genius. –Will Pritchard

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Fontana / Drag City

Scott Walker turned the act of bucking expectations into its own class of performance art—a lifelong piece urging his career as a renegade pop star into increasingly thorny terrain. 1995's Tilt was especially jagged; 11 years after releasing the orchestral Climate of Hunter, Walker burst from the abyss with a disturbed industrial opera. Walker's voice is booming and grand, towering even amid blasting pipe organ and chopper-blade percussion. His lyrics are stark, cryptic, and terrifying, though he later lamented that critics missed the comedy in his work (the subtly raunchy "Rosary" affirms his humor). The purchasing public were also prone to confusion; in the early 2000s, Walker reflected on one fan's assessment: "I had a guy sit down next to me in the tube," he recalled. "He said, ‘I have to tell you, I’m a big fan of yours. I bought your last two records… and I’m never going to buy one again!’" The man exited the train, leaving Walker delighted. It was all part of the performance. –Madison Bloom

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Maverick / Warner Bros.

Inspired by the deaths of her mother and her friend Gianni Versace, as well as the birth of her daughter Lourdes, Ray of Light is Madonna's most heartbroken and most ecstatically joyful album. Fusing icy electronica and new-age music with elements of trip-hop, Britpop, and grunge, Ray of Light found Madonna trying, with all her might, to evoke the blackest depths and most euphoric joys of the human heart. The album's title track sounds like it was forged inside a meteor; the surreal, pitch-black poem "Mer Girl" is as still as death itself. The grief of the latter is an insurmountable tide, while motherhood, evoked in the former, acts as a ballast against it. No other Madonna album, before or after, has captured a feeling so vast. –Shaad D’Souza

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Rap-A-Lot / Noo Trybe

In 1991, Brad Jordan was already Houston's definitive orator of desperation, struggle, and occasional triumph. Three years removed from his introduction to America on the Geto Boys’ "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," the rapper aptly named Scarface settled into a wizened, often bleak groove on his third solo album, The Diary. Steeped in the Southern blues, with syrupy yet morose production from Mike Dean, N.O. Joe, Uncle Eddie, and Scarface himself, The Diary is a tour through the mind of a paranoid and fatalistic man who happened to end up speaking for thousands of listeners who also stopped giving a fuck a long time ago. Face crafts a picture of failed redemption on "I Seen a Man Die," takes aim at media hypocrisy and the demonization of gangsta rap on "Hand of the Dead Body" alongside Ice Cube, and ultimately damns America and society at large for making him, his peers, and his fans what they are. A bleaker picture never sounded so rich. –Brandon Caldwell

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Warp

Richard D. James once told David Toop that Selected Ambient Works Volume II was meant to feel like "standing in a power station on acid," swimming in electrical hum. The 1994 album marked an austere new extreme for a style that, in the early 1990s, was mostly associated with chillout rooms and post-rave comedowns. Crashing partiers would have found little comfort here: SAW II's more than two dozen tracks are as ethereal as the vapor rising from dry ice, and as stark as one of Dan Flavin's fluorescent tubes. It was a far cry from the lush pads and splintered breakbeats of Aphex's much more reassuring Selected Ambient Works 85-92, released just two years before, and the polar opposite of the hyperactive drill’n’bass he’d take up with 1995's …I Care Because You Do. But the album's singularity is part of what makes it so special—as though James had snuck into one of his beloved substations, swallowed a tab, and switched on his recorder, in the process picking up a frequency that was never to be repeated. –Philip Sherburne

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Epic

Sade would remain largely quiet for the remainder of the ’90s, but the icier electronic textures of Love Deluxe functioned as a bridge between the art pop scene of the previous decade and the trip-hop of the next, as their jazz-inflected sophisti-pop evolved from the warmth of the live club to the cold steel of the studio. The stiff breakbeat of "No Ordinary Love" is a sharp opening turn, and as the song progresses and lightly metal guitar riffs intertwine with Sade Adu's yearning voice, it becomes apparent why Deftones would later cover the song. On their earlier records, the band's playing is parallel to Adu's instrument, loosely flowing with an improvisatory ache, but on Love Deluxe, their function is more perpendicular—an almost robotically precise machine that creates a chilling sense of counterpoint to the singer's natural warmth. Once unfairly derided for sounding too smooth, Sade's Love Deluxe prefigured the chilled-out turn the British music scene would take in the years to come. –Nadine Smith

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Maverick

At a time when female singer-songwriters were getting just popular enough to have their talents regularly diminished by the rock establishment, Alanis was the most popular and most misunderstood of all. Her famous misuse of irony in "Ironic" (or was it intentional meta-irony?) left her even more open to mockery and the danger of being a flash in the pan. But Pill embodied a sharp, unashamed, sometimes hilarious range of emotions from rage to deep affection that listeners could relate to on a molecular level. "You Oughta Know" was the primal scream of a betrayed lover that dispenses with melancholy to embrace mess; "Head Over Feet" marveled at the long-resisted realization that healthy relationships can exist after all. We laughed at Alanis, but we also cried, yelled, and laughed with her. –Evie Nagy

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Kill Rock Stars

Getting people to agree on the one skill that made Elliott Smith an icon is nearly impossible, because there's too many to choose from. On his sophomore album, he established his wealth of talent and set its everlasting influence into motion. Recorded in friends’ basements with a stripped-down setup, Elliott Smith showcases everything that would define Smith as a singular artist: haunting lyrics ("Needle in the Hay"), odd guitar tunings and chords that sound easier to play than they are ("Southern Belle"), double-tracked vocals that add a depth and warmth to his voice ("St. Ides Heaven"), a songwriting style driven by delicacy and intuition ("Alphabet Town"). From the album's epochal opening strums onwards, Smith appears like an apparition surrounded by fog, equal parts dream and omen as he invites you to let the haze envelop you, too. –Nina Corcoran

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Mo' Wax

The expressive possibilities of sample-based music were still unfolding in the ’90s as 1) hungry copyright lawyers began litigating the artform into oblivion, and 2) America's rap mainstream began a hard-pivot into dirty-realist minimalism. All of which made the Sistine Chapel-scaled achievement of Endtroducing… that much more impressive.

Mostly instrumental and entirely sample-based, it fused an astonishing variety of fragments—of Metallica, Björk, Giorgio Moroder, Meredith Monk, Funkadelic, and even private press high school band recordings, many scavenged from the record shop on the album's iconic cover—using the fairly primitive tools that Sacramento, California record nerd and DJ Josh Davis had at his disposal: an Akai MPC60 sampler, a Technics SL-1200 turntable, and an Alesis ADAT digital recorder. The result is a crate-digger fantasia that collapses time and space, creating polyglot virtual supergroups of the living and the dead, the known and the unknown. It expanded—and exploded—the idea of what a hip-hop album could be, dazzlingly positing an art form that was capacious and voracious enough to contain multitudes. –Will Hermes

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Columbia

The Score—featuring U.S.-born Lauryn Hill and Pras Michel and Haitian immigrant Wyclef Jean—is suffused with a refugee's sense of being forever unstuck from place and time, voracious about using every bit of cultural material it can find, like someone collaging together the elements of an identity. What is subtext in so much of music is text here—it's an album about lives built in opposition, never wholly assimilable in a hostile land, which is to say it's an immigrant's album (and also an album about New Jersey). Even Hill, the star of the show, comes off here like a stranger in her own country.

There's a dizzying moment when Jean sings a version of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry" (the cover would later be remixed as a duet with Bob's son Stephen). The song folds into itself not just the original but the cover by Boney M. and the mordant sample of the cover by East Orange, New Jersey's Naughty by Nature, evoking at once the Haiti that Jean left, the Brooklyn he arrived in, the Jamaica that Bob Marley knew, and the Jersey of the Fugees’ present. There's something so moving about it—as if the song were trying to wrap its arms around the diaspora. –Tommy Craggs

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Kill Rock Stars

Dig Me Out is one of the rare rock albums that makes a case for rock as a revivifying force and does not whiff. Music is the air that Sleater-Kinney breathes; their voices are your favorite song, and you must know that committing to loving these women makes you liable to live in lyrical infamy. If you didn't get the message, it's there in their refined interplay and surging drama. In this corpus of sound, bolstered by robust rock, blues, and a fresh sense of playfulness, Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss got their satisfaction and stoked appetites that other forces were intent on diminishing. It was their biggest success to date, shaking off the vestiges of the post-riot grrrl era and euphorically laying siege to the cloistered rock establishment. "Can't take this away from me," Brownstein sings on "Words and Guitar," with matter-of-fact tartness. –Laura Snapes

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Jive

It was their third album, and their last chance. The Port Arthur, Texas duo Bun B and Pimp C had watched Jive Records bowdlerize their music for years—stripping samples, switching backing tracks, launching clueless and half-hearted promotions—and this time, their only request was to be left alone to make the album they heard in their heads.

Ridin’ Dirty was the result. Like Dr. Dre in the West, Pimp C dreamed of rap albums as layered and luxuriant as soul classics by Curtis Mayfield or Isaac Hayes. On Ridin’ Dirty, every breath sounds drawn in real time, every key feels pressed down by a finger right next to your ear. N.O. Joe, a mentor to Pimp C, played many of the drum tracks live, giving them the feel of a late-night band. Even Bun B's mesmerizing verse on "Murder"—a blizzard of interlocking lines, enjambment, and darting emphases meant to show the world that the South contained a rapper every bit as technically fearsome as JAY-Z or Nas—was recorded in a single take, with no punch-ins. It sold respectably. Promotions and media coverage remained sparse. Pimp C, who passed in 2007, wouldn't live to see Ridin’ Dirty become what it is today: The Chronic of the South, a single-album stand-in for "Texas rap," and one of the most pained and enduring documents of street struggles ever recorded. –Jayson Greene

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Columbia

Legendary girl groups aren't created overnight. Watch clips of a baby-faced Destiny's Child rehearsing or revisit the countless interviews where former members detailed the "Olympic-style" training regimen that would catapult them to fame. Their work ethic and talent caught the industry's eyes by the time the group's members—initially Beyoncé Knowles, Kelly Rowland, LaTavia Roberson, and LeToya Luckett—were still in high school, and their second album, The Writing's on the Wall, kept the world's attention. Produced by an all-star roster of seasoned industry professionals like Missy Elliott, Kandi Burruss, Kevin "She’kspere" Briggs and Rodney Jerkins, the album combined sophisticated R&B production with the exuberant theatrics of young women. There were controversial and empowering anthems, homages to The Godfather and Set it Off, playful threats to have AOL shut down their email because a man wouldn't stop messaging them, a slew of the decade's most reliable party-starting bangers. It was also the launching pad for contemporary pop's most enduring and evolutionary star, one that Beyoncé consistently pays homage to through periodic reunions and nostalgic home movie clips. –Heven Haile

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Duophonic / Elektra

"Olv 26," the sixth song on Stereolab's 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup, opens with the pulsing of a drum machine, the hissy and primitive sort that were attached to electronic organs in the 1960s and ’70s. These "rhythm boxes," as they were known back then, came with preloaded patterns for particular styles: waltz, cha cha, bossa nova, rock’n’roll. But to contemporary ears, their mechanized beats suggest rudimentary early stabs at genres that didn't yet exist: synth-pop, house, hip-hop, techno. Stereolab's fourth album lives in this historical interzone, coming off simultaneously like the past's vision of a glorious future that never quite came to pass, and an attempt at recreating an idyllic past they never experienced for themselves. Lætitia Sadier, Tim Gane, and their cohort were students of the sorts of music the rhythm boxes were trying to emulate, but also of krautrock, punk, disco, classical minimalism—anything that found its groove through stripped-down repetition. On Emperor Tomato Ketchup, they synthesized all of it. The sense of lost futures was not only an aesthetic proposition, but a political one as well: Joyous in tone but often scathing in subject matter, the album imagined a borderless utopia of sound while denouncing the powers that be for preventing such a paradise from manifesting in the world outside your headphones. –Andy Cush

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Mr. Lady

Evolving from Kathleen Hanna's post-Bikini Kill solo project the Julie Ruin, Le Tigre were a leftist School House Rock girl group rolling their eyes at electronic music elitism. Their debut album opened with the question "Who took the bomp?", inverting the doo-wop standard to declare that nothing is fresh, only repurposed. But Hanna and collaborators Johanna Fateman and Sadie Benning didn't just offer criticism; there was also gray space, and solutions. "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?" is meditative proto-cancel culture wrestling with a problematic fave over a mechanical heartbeat, while "Hot Topic" suggests a host of artistic palliatives, from David Wojnarowicz to No Limit soldier Mia X. Above all, Le Tigre is pure, exuberant fun—not to mention the album that called Rudy Giuliani a "fucking jerk" before the rest of the country knew it to be true. –Claire Lobenfeld

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LaFace / Arista

With their impressive debut, 1992's light-hearted Ooooooohhh… on the TLC Tip, the Atlanta trio of T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli introduced themselves as the girls next door of new jack swing. On their follow-up, TLC remade the template for R&B and hip-hop hybrids altogether. CrazySexyCool is best remembered for its massive coming-of-age hits: horn-stabbed infidelity narrative "Creep," socially conscious Stax-horns singalong "Waterfalls," consummately horny slow jam "Red Light Special." But its brash spirit is embodied in the cameo-filled interludes, like when Chilli prank calls Puff Daddy and feigns arousal only to reveal, as her moans give way to a flush, that she's on the toilet. On guitar-blazing finale "Sumthin’ Wicked This Way Comes," Left Eye even trades introspective verses with a pre-ATLiens André 3000. Collectively, TLC always prevailed. Their cover of Prince's winking come-on "If I Was Your Girlfriend" may have lost the implied gender reversal of the original, but it cheekily demonstrated what the world would learn on TLC's next album, 1999's FanMail: These women would suffer no scrubs. –Marc Hogan

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Loud / RCA

Inspired by John Woo's The Killer and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… stars Raekwon as Lex Diamonds, a Henry Hill-like character who uses a cryptic mix of street slang and Five Percenter mathematics to narrate the life and crimes of his gang, the Wu-Gambinos. As Tony Starks, Diamonds’ right-hand man, Ghostface Killah raps with the hot-headed swagger of Joe Pesci in a Scorsese film—in rhymes and skits they plot their hits, throw jabs at competitors, and dream about getting out of the game for good. RZA's production acts like a gritty score for their braggadocious bars; his sample choice is at its murkiest, with dark piano chords, unintelligible moans, and crying violins creating an aura of uncertainty that emphasizes Raekwon's stories of the struggle. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… was a cinematic masterpiece, expanding the lore of the Wu-Tang Clan and ushering in a new era of mafioso rap. –Arjun Srivatsa

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Nothing / Interscope

The Downward Spiral is the full blossoming of Trent Reznor's compositional genius and insatiable id. His wants are extreme (to break it up; to smash it up; to fuck you like an animal; to fuck everyone in the world), his alienation is profound. Paradoxically, his yelps of pain were never more uncompromising and never more commercially impactful.

A loose concept album chronicling a slow-motion descent into addiction and suicide, The Downward Spiral fit snugly with the angst and self-hatred of the grunge revolution that ended with Kurt Cobain's death in a Seattle greenhouse, weeks after this album was released. But musically, NIN's greatest work bypasses grunge in favor of subtle textures and mangled nods to the art-rock of Reznor's youth. Its stature as a masterpiece was assured well before Johnny Cash took a liking to its most haunting song, further cementing the album's eternal anguish. –Zach Schonfeld

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Death Row / Interscope

Luxurious in gangsta allegory, this 27-track opus from hip-hop's Shakspeare in Karl Kani is all Alizé, no absolution. It's an ungovernable object of flawed glory and gore crammed with tales of guns and gold, peppered with emotional conflict, and propelled by 2Pac's outlaw brand of storytelling. The first two tracks he put on wax for the record—the snub-nosed "Ambitionz Az a Ridah" and the elegiac "I Ain't Mad at Cha," both recorded in the hours after his release from an eight-month stint in jail due to a sexual abuse conviction—typify the intoxicating polarities of All Eyez on Me, of what makes it such an entrancing work, in spite of its rank misogyny.

The album is profuse with classics, including the era-defining "California Love," but where it finds illumination—something Pac chased his entire career, trying as he could to evade the growing darkness around him—is in its funk-rich sound and range. Every Pac is given face: people's champ, pariah, renegade. By September 1996, only seven months after the record's release, Pac would be dead, killed in a storm of gunfire on the Las Vegas strip. We haven't stopped looking for him since. –Jason Parham

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Virgin

Released a few months before Janet Jackson made her film debut in the John Singleton picture Poetic Justice, janet. oozed maturity from a distinctive and ravenous narrator tapping into the intimacy of blues and the expansive improvisation of jazz. Urged on by trusted collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Jackson co-wrote and co-produced every song on the record, and her gift for arrangements culminated in a project that was revelatory without pretense and assertive with its candor. A deeply personal undertaking, janet. irrevocably shifted the public and private inclinations of a society raised to visualize and consume: Tracks like "That's the Way Love Goes," "If" and "Any Time, Any Place" illustrated the depths and context of her desire and longing for liberation. The record had a seismic influence on artists working inside pop and R&B, as well as a generation that would make pleasure and sexual autonomy a cornerstone of their brands and lyrical signatures in hip-hop. –Tarisai Ngangura

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Sony

In the summer of 1996, Fiona Apple's piano-thudding debut revealed a fully formed voice that quickly cut through the fuzzed-out alt-rock of the era. Music executives who heard Tidal before it came out thought they were being tricked; it seemed impossible that songs like the knowing "Shadowboxer" and eviscerating "Sleep to Dream" could have come from a self-taught 18-year-old. Made with producer Andrew Slater, Apple's music on Tidal is informed equally by the stylings of hip-hop, and jazz titans like Ella Fitzgerald, with lyrics that glide with the rhythmic grace of a poet. It is the sound of an artist emerging with a sense of clarifying self-sufficiency, opening up pivotal space for listeners who experience the world with the same vivid intensity.

Apple's incisive songwriting, smoky alto, and endlessly perceptive lyrics on Tidal remain as potent as ever. The delicate "Sullen Girl" and "Never Is a Promise" soothe the soul by opening up and nursing traumatic wounds; the instantly infamous "Criminal," written in 45 minutes to satisfy Sony's demand for a radio single, moves with seductive, snarling energy for a coolly insouciant bloodletting. The emotional flotsam that Apple sifts through—falling violently in and out of love, coping with depressive fallout, and finding a sense of self and purpose through it all—resonated with an entire generation and beyond, setting off tremors that reached everyone from Kanye to Olivia Rodrigo. It also led to her 1997 VMAs acceptance speech, a stunningly honest wake-up call to audiences entranced by the world of MTV that would come to define Apple's ethos as an artist who moves at her own pace and refuses to take any of the industry's bullshit. Hard-won resilience animates each of Apple's albums, but it first took root within Tidal's searingly truthful music. –Eric Torres

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Undeas / Big Beat / Atlantic

Brooklyn rapper Lil’ Kim's debut album delivered a pussy power permission slip packaged in a mink coat. Brimming with unblushing sexuality, Hard Core's humor, tight narratives, and bracing toughness have been an undercurrent in rap for nearly 25 years. There's no Nicki, no CupcakKe, no "WAP" without these open-mouthed, open-legged bars. Kim's gifts as a presence and a performer have resonated everywhere from various Real Housewives franchises to the upper echelons of high fashion. She offers a cheat sheet for surviving and thriving when the world wasn't built for you to dominate. –Claire Lobenfeld

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4AD / Elektra

Last Splash thrust the Breeders out of the fetid bedroom environs of their claustrophobic 1990 debut, Pod, and into the surf-grunge sunshine. "Cannonball" took the album platinum, elevating a band previously known as Pixies bassist Kim Deal's side project to alt-rock superstar status. But so monolithic is the single that it overshadows a record whose greatest asset is its sonic and thematic unity.

Like a beach blowout where everyone stays in the sun too long and somebody gets stung by a jellyfish, Last Splash counterbalances its exuberant pop moments with the snarling pith of "Saints" and the light disorientation of "No Aloha." Squalling instrumentals that riff on surf classics fuse the tracks into a swell of waves that crest in pristine choruses, then disappear into a foam of feedback. Sure, you can extract one perfect song from the flotsam, but it makes an even bigger splash in its natural setting. –Judy Berman

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Warp

You could spend an entire essay trying to elucidate the alien power of a single measure of Aphex Twin's Richard D. James Album: the minute choreography of kicks and snares, dancing like electrons around a nucleus; the wistful turn of a particular melodic line; the way an ostensibly mundane sample—say, the snippet of James’ father calling his name that punctuates "4"—becomes almost painfully loaded with feeling when it lands at just the right moment. To hear James tell it, that's the way he composed the music, tinkering over every stretch of rhythm as if it were a Lilliputian sculpture, spending hours arranging elements that pass by in the span of seconds for the listener. He wasn't the only musician working in this fashion at the time, and was open about the influence of contemporaries like Squarepusher and Luke Vibert. But, perhaps more than any producer before or since, he found beauty and holism in this microscopic view of music, and never more so than on Richard D. James. The tiny rhythmic vibrations are not mere filigree for the larger arc of a given composition; they are the very heart of it. It's as if each measure contains the entire album in miniature: galaxies spinning inside every atom. –Andy Cush

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Verve / Polydor

The last two Talk Talk records occupy a particularly rarified space in the history of cult-classic albums. The mythology is irresistible: One-time synth-pop hitmakers get a longer leash to experiment in the studio, dissolve their sound into an imagistic sweep with little precedent in rock, take new pleasure in improvised performance and sprawling moments of silence, and retire on as high a note as one can imagine. But even that lofty narrative doesn't do justice to the music. On Laughing Stock, the band's final record, they whiplash between extremes. Sometimes the sound is serene and gorgeous, like the gentle, brush-stroked "New Grass"; and sometimes it's harsher, as in "Ascension Day," a thrashing epic that presages the decade's most explosive post-rock bands. The image that always comes to mind while listening is a sanctuary, but Talk Talk were just as quick to knock down the walls. In the last second of "Ascension Day," the tape cuts mid-performance, ending the song abruptly and inorganically, suggesting the whole thing is an illusion. The magic was always ours to create. –Sam Sodomsky

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Mercury

Lucinda Williams was two decades into her career at the cross-section of country and rock when she finally released her full-length opus, the album that earned her commercial success, wide acclaim, and status as one of the most influential living songwriters. She had traversed and absorbed the American South on a sensory level. She was 45 years old. With four previous albums under her belt, Williams had endured 20 years of being told "no": by labels, by producers, by awful men. Heartbreak, romantic and creative, has its way of producing clarity, which she brought to her narratives of drunken angels and metal firecrackers and Greenville, Rosedale, and Jackson. On Car Wheels, everything cohered into a blue-skied open-road travelogue that still feels like freedom. –Jenn Pelly

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Merge

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a celebration of the unconscious as a source of creative inspiration. Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum, who was driven to make field recordings, loved folk music of all kinds, and had his life changed by the idiosyncratic punk of Minutemen; he worked as hard as any successful musician, painstakingly writing and revising songs until he got them right. But he also trusted that the unexplainable images that bubbled up in his mind were worth setting to music. Aeroplane, the masterpiece of NMH's brief discography, unfolds like a water-damaged 8mm film of these fragments, with semen-stained mountaintops and scenes featuring Anne Frank, reincarnated as a little boy, pounding out a melody on a burning piano. For those who hear something special in it, the album feels like the product of a rare kind of telepathy, as if versions of your own obsessions have somehow made their way into songs by someone you’ve never met. –Mark Richardson

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Rawkus / Priority

Mos Def's discography is a testament to the idea that Blackness isn't a monolith. Black on Both Sides, his 1999 solo debut, was the Brooklyn rapper's attempt to blend his thoughts on racism, dwindling resources, and all kinds of love to create a fluid and biting portrait of Black America on the edge of a new millenium, a marriage of the smooth and the confrontational. Def—who now goes by Yasiin Bey—wasn't afraid to use his skills as an MC to examine the world's problems from his soapbox ("New World Water," "Mr. Nigga"), but Both Sides never feels sanctimonious. He draws connections between the history of Black music and the Five Elements of hip-hop while contextualizing rap's birthplace as a wellspring of creativity that extends beyond the genre's origins ("Habitat"). Black On Both Sides is conscious in the literal sense—self-aware, honest, unpretentious, a cornucopia of Black sound to weather listeners through the towering inferno. –Dylan Green

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Matador

Pavement's decision to graft a shadow history of ’60s and ’70s California folk-rock and psychedelia onto the abrasive, Fall-inspired noise of their previous sound made total sense once the end product was rendered. But in some ways this obscures what a truly strange and wondrous inspiration it was in the first place. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain's 12 tracks are alternately sparkling and insinuating, mournful and ominous and finally cathartic, variously evoking the desert swoon of the Flying Burrito Brothers, the swaggering two-guitar overdrive of Buffalo Springfield, and the eerie chill of jazz pioneer Dave Brubeck. When Stephen Malkmus sings, "Good night to the rock’n’roll era" over the closing tribute to famed concert promoter Bill Graham, "Fillmore Jive," it's part funeral and part exorcism: a final postscript for the sandcastle paradise of ’60s utopianism. Freedom's just another word when everything is lost. –Elizabeth Nelson

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One Little Independent

It's a tale as old as time: a girl from the wilderness hits it big, moves to the city during her Saturn Return, starts clubbing, finds herself amid the chaos and solitude, and makes an art-pop masterpiece. Alternating between feral and tender songs, 1995's Post is a portal into the pulsing sensuality of British trip-hop and electronica as seen through Björk's eyes. Like 1993's Debut, the sound is highly eclectic—from the surprisingly faithful cover of Betty Hutton's "It's Oh So Quiet" to the twinges of baroque music—but Post marks the first time Björk really stepped into the tastemaker role she occupies to this day, assembling collaborators from across the underground (Tricky, Nellee Hooper, Graham Massey, Howie B) to work in service of her vision. The music follows the emotion: Every exclamation mark of the soul is met with a freaky horn blast or tribal drum break, every dark glance an industrial beat or a mysterious twinge of harpsichord. And with her supernaturally nimble voice and to-the-point poetry, Björk is able to articulate emotional scenarios with the clarity of discovering there is a foreign word for a feeling that remains ineffable in your mother tongue. On Post, this includes sex without touching, music as life force, death dreams that make you wake up grateful, and the way falling in love can feel like the world's shortest fireworks display. It's an album of apathy and desire, restlessness and freedom, capriciousness and control—in other words, Björk's becoming. –Jill Mapes

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Def Jam / Columbia

In 1990, Public Enemy had a way of making wildly engrossing political art while also reinforcing the very things they sought to destroy. The group was drawing on a strain of Black nationalist political practice that was self-defeatingly conspiratorial, that saw the fiendish workings of long-tentacled cabals behind everything—the media, Hollywood, 911, the music industry, AIDS, and so on. One could read revolutionary anticapitalist or antiracist intent into these ideas when taken in isolation—and that was always easy to do, given Chuck D's immense talent for quotably pungent insights—but the vision uniting them was ultimately a conservative one, given to reactionary essentialisms: a people, a nation (mainly the men), beset from without and sometimes within by a parasitic Other.

At Public Enemy's best, the whole of their music had the potential to create solidarity beyond the narrower ideas being pushed in some of their verses. The "organized noise" cultivated by Hank Shocklee and the Bomb Squad on Fear of a Black Planet was densely allusive, reshuffling and reworking artists and cultural totems and ideas both past and present—James Brown, Sly Stone, Funkadelic, Bobby Byrd, Afrika Bambaataa, sirens, hisses, polyrhythms, Malcolm X's "Message to the Grass Roots." The production was a thumping bricolage, the effect of which was to submit Public Enemy into a sort of communal dialogue with the latter half of the Black 20th century. To listen to Fear of a Black Planet was not to become a passive receptacle for Chuck D's politics, but to open yourself up to what the sociologist Paul Gilroy calls the "restless, recombinant qualities" of the Black Atlantic cultures. Any political meanings you’re tempted to assign to "Welcome to the Terrordome" or "Fight the Power" have to contend with something bigger than words: the feelings of power, love, and liberation that come over a roomful of people who have decided to move their asses, together. –Tommy Craggs

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Warp / Skam

In 1998, an album wrapped in a grainy family photo, faces lost to time—or scrubbed from it—appeared on better record store racks. It boasted the imprimatur of not one but two of the decade's finest labels, Sheffield's heavy-hitting Warp and Manchester's mysterious Skam, as likely to put out a Frisbee as it was the latest Autechre side project. But Music Has the Right to Children, the first release from Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin that most people were lucky enough to hear, was a revelation. Boards of Canada coaxed breaks into motion as if excavating ancient rock formations while high on their own supply of hairy psych-rock samples (even Hair itself). It's nostalgic but not dissociative: The album's most idiosyncratic aspect are the wobbling voices that gurgle, "I love you…," or, "There are a lot of different me's…," mostly summoned from 1970s North American public television, that ancient medium of collective meaning-making. Decades on, Music remains mystical and deeply human, an uncanny valley rung with melodies drifting off all grids. It is folk music for people who use DATs instead of dobros. The faces might be mirrors. –Jesse Dorris

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Jeepster

In 1996, Belle and Sebastian approached perfection, twice. First came Tigermilk, a quietly profound debut recorded as a school project. If You’re Feeling Sinister arrived a few months later, an album that presses its nose against a windowpane and peers out at the world beyond, yearning to indulge in beauty and ugliness alike. Writing in the shadow of his yearslong struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome, frontman Stuart Murdoch emerged as a Glaswegian Salinger, a storyteller with an eye for misfits: a track and field star as accomplished in sex as she is in athletics; a curmudgeonly veteran with nostalgia for Roxy Music; a suicidal girl who enjoys S&M and Bible studies. Set atop gorgeous arrangements inspired by swooning ’60s pop and the Velvet Underground at their most melodic, these songs set the standard for pretty much all indie pop that was to come. –Quinn Moreland

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Death Row / Interscope

From the outset, The Chronic announces itself as a revenge record. Dr. Dre had spent the previous five or so years as the underpaid sonic architect of West Coast gangsta rap, and his first solo outing served as retribution to all the haters and exploiters. "Niggas with attitudes? Nah," his charge Snoop Dogg announced on the intro, "Niggas on a muthafuckin’ mission."

Dr. Dre achieved the sweetest vengeance of all by crafting G-funk, a whole new sound that would become the era's most influential. Digging into the Parliament/Funkadelic crates, the producer shifted hip-hop's sonic landscape toward a sumptuous mix of sampling and live instrumentation. In addition to the hypnotic classics "Let Me Ride" and "Nuthin’ but a G Thang," The Chronic also offered a response to the 1992 L.A. uprising with "The Day the Niggaz Took Over" and "Lil’ Ghetto Boy"—not as explicit political comment but rather by showing the perspective of those living amid the day-to-day realities of street life and police violence. The album's misogyny is at times overwhelming, but as an unflinching documentary and musical landmark, it has few peers. –Mychal Denzel Smith

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Kill Rock Stars

Either/Or is the hinge point in Elliott Smith's story, the last moment where his mastery—of home recording techniques, of his intricate guitar parts, and most crucially, of his acrid, empathetic songwriting—bloomed under protective cover of his relative anonymity. He was surrounded by a close-knit circle of admiring friends, and he recorded many of his most beloved classics—"Between the Bars," "Angeles," "Pictures of Me," "Say Yes"—in their living rooms and bedrooms, or at Jackpot!, the ramshackle studio he helped build with Larry Crane.

Within a year, Smith would find himself backstage at the Oscars in a rumpled white suit, listening to the comforting words of Celine Dion as he braced to perform "Miss Misery"—a song he’d recorded in an idle moment at Jackpot!—on national television. He would field phone calls from People magazine; he would become label mates with Randy Newman. Some of his definitive work still lay ahead, but from here on out, he would forever be "Elliott Smith." If you want Elliott, Either/Or is where you can still find him—cigarettes on his breath, long-necked bottle hooked between his fingers about to tell a silly joke to the friend down the bar. This is where he was closest to us, and thus when his talent seemed most miraculous. –Jayson Greene

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Columbia

Illmatic was to some extent an act of recalibration. When the 17-year-old Nas stunned listeners with his guest turn on Main Source's 1991 track "Live at the Barbecue," he was still dabbling in the shock rap that cast him as an adolescent "snuffing Jesus." Traces of that sensibility sneak onto his debut, but as he neared 20 he became fixated on the passage of time. Visions of his friends locked up ("The World Is Yours") or "years in the hundreds" ("Life's a Bitch") make him write long, sympathetic letters to his incarcerated friends ("One Love"); he's wistful when he raps about listening to Rap Attack on the radio ("Halftime") and even about New York drug lords Supreme McGriff and Alpo Martinez—on a song called "Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park)." Nas communicates all this through rhymes that are staggeringly dense, their scenes and sentences breaking unpredictably across the ends of bars, their details precise, their virtuosity somehow beside the point. –Paul A. Thompson

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Drag City

American Water was the sea change in the Silver Jews catalog, a moment when David Berman gave in to melody and made a warm and inviting record. The album has lines that will change the way you see the world and others that rattle around your head like high school lovers in recurring dreams. Its calling cards, "Random Rules" and "The Wild Kindness," are beautiful songs that make life feel briefly hopeful; when Berman sings, "I’m gonna shine out in the wild kindness and hold the world to its word," it's as if nothing bad could ever happen. In between the bookends are handfuls of lyrics that are beguiling and stirring, unable to be shaken; it's often as if Berman is contorting the landscape to his lyrical whims, turning ordinary observations profound or sinister, depending on the song. The apex of the Silver Jews discography, American Water breathes through the contrast of Berman's bare profundity and his unruly poetics, brightened by Stephen Malkmus’ playful and virtuosic guitar playing. Life exists in the crevices we can't explain. –Matthew Strauss

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EMI

Looking like a sexy ruffneck, sounding like a mix of Al Green and Prince, and able to write compelling songs on-demand, 21-year-old musical wunderkind D’Angelo was positioned as R&B's great hope back in 1995. He crafted an idiosyncratic sound for his debut album Brown Sugar, blending jazz and soul with the low-end beatmaking of hip-hop acts like A Tribe Called Quest. Enlisting collaborators like Raphael Saadiq and Tribe's Ali Shaheed Muhammad,, D’Angelo struck a chord with the after-hours nightclub simmer of title track, the burnished mackin’ music of "Lady," the paranoid humor of "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker," and the questing gospel of album closer "Higher." The singer, songwriter, and producer would delve even deeper into his one-of-a-kind sound five years later with the talismanic Voodoo, but Brown Sugar is where the magic began. –Jason King

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Epic

At the time of the release of Fiona Apple's second album, few knew what to make of the music—one critic compared it to Korn (!)—but everyone thought they knew what to make of Apple herself, their takes plagued by cartoonish misogyny. Apple knew all this; she was always several steps ahead.

When the Pawn… is about knowing your patterns, knowing the rubble they’ve made of your life—and knowing you’ll do it again. Producer Jon Brion set a baroque stage of arrangements that careen like off-rails Cirque du Soleil. But he just sketched the blueprints. Apple constructed, then wrecked, the house. She played the piano like assassins use knives. Her vocal roles are larger-than-life: precise and unsingably fast, fit for a technical rapper, or open-throated and dramatic, like a stage diva commandeering an encore. On the thunderous choruses of "Limp" and "Get Gone," she summons hundreds of women against countless detractors. Her force spares no one, much less herself. –Katherine St. Asaph

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4AD

By 1990, when Cocteau Twins released Heaven or Las Vegas—their final album for 4AD, the independent UK label that had shepherded their journey from post-punk mystics to ambient-pop dream-weavers—the Scottish trio was under immense pressure. Singer Elizabeth Fraser and guitarist Robin Guthrie had given birth to their first child, yet Guthrie's drug addiction was dragging down the couple and the group. The world around them was changing, too. The protective cocoon of the 1980s underground had decisively split open; former peers were playing stadiums, and the murky, hermetic sound the Cocteaus had pioneered was being supplanted by louder, sunnier strains of alternative rock. None of that is audible in Heaven or Las Vegas, the most effortless album in their catalog, bursting with light and hope. There are nods to the new decade in programmed beats that hint at dance and hip-hop rhythms, but otherwise they simply sound like themselves distilled into their most potent form. Simon Raymonde's prominent basslines give the band an unexpected melodic push; Guthrie's guitars fan out like streams of light, a miracle of transubstantiation; Fraser maintains all her ethereal mystique while sharpening her voice until it cuts like a laser through velvet. At times, an intelligible phrase even burns through the pastel haze, as on "Iceblink Luck": "Burn this whole madhouse down." Rarely is a fire so cleansing. –Philip Sherburne

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Kedar / Universal

Baduizm presented like an ideology, but felt more like a spell: the mesmerizing introduction to Ms. "On and On" Badu, a jazz-inclined soul singer with a rapper's cadence who sounded like she invented the meaning of being "in the pocket." In a decade that practically required shine and flash, the incisive Fort Greene-via-Dallas 26-year-old peeled soul music to its raw heart, purring roaming odes to sex and snare drums, self-assurance and spirituality, and her weariness of social ills and unserious dudes. She did so over Rhodes pianos, boom-bap beats, upright bass and a little band from Philly called The Roots. Kicking off a career-long genius for deploying onomatopoeia in service to the vibe ("boom-klat, boom-klat," she intoned on "Rim Shot (Intro)"), Baduizm was a surprise hit that redirected R&B so fiercely it ultimately became a genre unto itself, a back-to-roots evolution that would eventually be dubbed "neo-soul," with the silken-voiced Badu as its endlessly cool beacon. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

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Island

Polly Jean Harvey comes on like an unstoppable pestilence on her second album, a wretched presence attacking from every angle who will never let you rest. "I might as well be dead," she ruminates at the end of "Legs," which oozes like a toxic spillage. Then she revels in the feint: "But I could kill you instead." If her debut, Dry, had the texture of scorched earth, then the Steve Albini-produced Rid of Me, with its reckless application of the loud-quiet-loud dynamic, often sounds like the ground being torn up with crude glee. Harvey turns this volatility into her weapon against the obliterating emotional violence and suffocating gender dynamics she exorcizes on this album, framed through a cast of destitute characters. They’re brought to life by an artist whose facility for horror suggested an unsettling affinity with it: Harvey's catalog isn't short on frights, but Rid of Me is the one that’ll keep you up at night. –Laura Snapes

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Blackground / Atlantic

Aaliyah's first union with Missy Elliott and Timbaland was a jolt, completely upending R&B through a collective vision of futurism, cyber goth, and sci-fi samples that remain virtually unmatched in scope and impact, as evidenced by the number of contemporary musicians still mining her catalog for inspiration. One in a Million arrived when R&B needed an overhaul, and Aaliyah was the perfect vessel: her breathy but assured alto gave her an aura of mystique, and she possessed a kind of reticence and remove even while singing about her own desire. (Furthering this mystique was the unfounded rumor that her signature side-part and sunglasses were hiding an amblyopic eye.) Her own reasons for this remain cause for speculation—she’d been illegally child-married to R. Kelly for less than a year when One in a Million came out—but the record was unmistakably the sound of her gaining her agency as a young woman and changing the course of music history, all before she even graduated from high school. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

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Bad Boy / Arista

It's a coming-of-age tale set in a long gone Brooklyn, the cornerstone of a historic moment in hip-hop, the album that made the East Coast feel like the center of the rap universe again. There's hardly a wasted breath: Biggie's rapping on his 1994 debut is purposeful, his storytelling is sprawling and intricate yet concise, his voice plows through the funk and soul of Diddy's handpicked producers like a heavy-duty snow blower. Even the interlude of Biggie just getting busy has a point. It's all part of a persona mythical enough to feel as cinematic as the Blaxploitation and mafioso flicks he was inspired by, and real enough that his corner boy tales and cold-blooded violence resonated everywhere. He could be vulnerable in more ways than one, whether it was grappling with how his lifestyle had turned a parent's love into fear on "Things Done Changed," or imagining taking his own life on "Suicidal Thoughts." Through all the darkness and fatalism, it's got a celebratory feel with the smooth maximalism that oozes out of the crossover hits like "Big Poppa" and "Juicy." There have been rappers who have tried to recapture Biggie's presence, voice, and ability to be both grounded and larger than life at the same time, but Ready to Die itself is completely inimitable. Murals don't do it justice. –Alphonse Pierre

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Virgin

The singles are among the most potent dance music gateway drugs we’ve got: One moment you’re digging "Around the World"'s hooky persistence and "Da Funk"'s lowrider squelch, then suddenly you’ve taken up permanent residence in Daft Punk's world, way out there among lo-pass filters, roller-rink basslines, and stacks of brilliant, rough ‘n’ tumble thumpers from Chicago and Detroit's rich histories. That two upper-middle-class kids working from a bedroom overlooking Montmartre's cobbled streets could make these naked influences scalable without losing any of the original stuff's bite, garnering all-important approval from electronic music's Black and Latin forebears in the process, was an improbability bordering on absurdity.

And while some rave hits can lose their buzz in weeks, Homework simply never cooled off, carrying Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo through the underground, up the pop charts, and into the next century. After a quarter century of DJ culture's oft-ludicrous mutations, you need only witness the reaction on any half-decent dancefloor when the zipper-on-leather mania of "Rock’n Roll" or "Rollin’ & Scratchin’" drops to understand Homework's shatterproof place in clubland's trophy cabinet. That roar is immortality calling. –Gabriel Szatan

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LaFace

The dueling personalities at the heart of OutKast have always been the source of their greatness: Big Boi beats the block with his boots, while André dreams of outer space. Their first two records reveled in their own otherness—first as the premier playas in their own community, and then as extra-terrestrials, alienated from the world at large. But on Aquemini, Big Boi and André 3000 embrace the complementary nature of their differences and create something that surpasses the sum of its parts. Weaving funk, soul, gospel, and psych influences through freewheeling recording sessions with live musicians—a departure from the Dungeon Family's basement production on those early LPs—the duo obliterated the boundaries and expectations for a Southern rap group without ever sounding like anyone other than themselves.

André's relationship with Erykah Badu drew them into the sonic orbit of the burgeoning neo-soul movement, but despite the parallels with the Soulquarians’ Afrocentric Nag Champa vibe on tracks like the sprawling opus "Liberation," Aquemini is staunchly a record by and of the Dirty South. Its biggest hit manages to flip one of the most iconic moments of the Civil Rights Movement into a giddy harmonica hoedown, and the seven-minute dub session "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" remains singular, a transportive nostalgia trip drenched in sensory input and a timeless horn melody. Stankonia would be their true breakout moment, and by the time they released the companion solo LPs Speakerboxx and The Love Below, their individual star power threatened to swallow the group whole. Aquemini remains their most ambitious attempt to explore the quirks that make them fit together like clockwork. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz

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Go! Beat

Despite its reputation as one of the cornerstones of trip-hop, Bristol trio Portishead's 1994 debut is much darker—and stranger—than the conventional wisdom might lead you to believe. For one thing, the genre hadn't yet solidified, and 22-year-old crate-digger Geoff Barrow wasn't much interested in ambient music anyway. Sampling vintage soul and channeling the spirit of old spy movies, he and 37-year-old guitarist Adrian Utley sketched out a skeletal strain of boom-bap where dial-tone buzz and homemade breakbeats swam in an ocean of silence. It was 29-year-old singer Beth Gibbons who was tasked with filling in that emptiness, but despite the warmth of her Billie Holiday-indebted croon her singing is uniformly forlorn, her presence as unsettling as it is intimate. In the 28 years since, few soundtracks to dorm-room hookups have inspired a greater sense of dread. –Philip Sherburne

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DGC

While alternative rock was certainly no secret throughout the ’80s, Nirvana's uncomfortable rocket ride to the top on 1991's Nevermind marked the genre's supernova moment. Launched by "Smells Like Teen Spirit"s bare, twitchy guitar intro and explosive drums, the album's ennui, angst, and incredible songwriting made it suddenly seem like talented outcasts could rule the world. Many would try to bottle Nirvana's soured essence in the years following, but few other bands were working with the same quality of raw components: Krist Novoselic's hypnotic basslines, Dave Grohl's furious pace, and Kurt Cobain's ability to create anthemic choruses out of the blunt-edge scrape of a single word. Veering through tempos with an alchemic mix of poignancy and catchiness, Nevermind explored the duality of acceptance and rejection, but never made it feel like a lesson. Fuzzed-out "In Bloom" and chill "Come As You Are" managed to be opposite sides of the same coin, with Cobain sizing up the people who liked all their pretty songs but didn't fully grasp them, before opening his arms to misfits everywhere. Call it a generational changing of the guard if you must, but these 12 songs connected with young listeners around the world—some who just thought they rocked, and many more who recognized Cobain's wary POV for what it was: the truth. –Jessica Letkemann

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Jive

Q-Tip once told Dr. Dre that he made A Tribe Called Quest's 1993 album Midnight Marauders after listening to The Chronic; Dre told Tip that he knew he had to make The Chronic after listening to A Tribe Called Quest's 1991 album The Low End Theory. The anecdote is notable as one of the most pointed examples of steel sharpening steel, but also because it puts into proper context how meaningful The Low End Theory is to music history: Remove this record from the timeline, and generations of greatness could have disappeared with it. That includes Tribe's direct descendants like the Roots, Common, Yasiin Bey, Kanye West, J Dilla, and Pharrell, along with everything that spun-off The Chronic's branch of influence, from Snoop Dogg to 50 Cent to Eminem.

With their second album, Tribe executed a flawless new fusion of ’90s boom-bap and jazz, spearheaded by Q-Tip's legendary perfectionism, while Phife Dawg's witty and bombastic performances proved he was no mere hanger-on. There was Busta Rhymes’ incendiary star-making verse on "Scenario" and "Excursions," which built on a sample of the legendary jazz drummer Art Blakey and additional vocals from Civil Rights era revolutionaries the Last Poets. And perhaps the quintessential Tribe song in "Check the Rhime," a masterclass in back-and-forth rhyming only Run-DMC could touch. –Mychal Denzel Smith

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DGC

In 1994, Courtney Love had a hell of a lot to be angry about: unrelenting abuse at the hands of the media and misogynist grunge fans; Child Protective Services’ brief seizure of her infant daughter; husband Kurt Cobain's personal downward spiral, which ended with his suicide just days before the release of Live Through This, Hole's second album. She channeled all this into a masterpiece of wrathful beauty—12 tracks bubbling over with poison-candy-apple hooks and some of the most deliciously melodic screams ever recorded. Raging against abusive lovers ("Violet"), victim-blaming ("Asking for It"), impossible beauty standards ("Miss World"), motherhood ("Plump"), and more, Love became an icon for the misfits, the survivors, and the fed-up. Live Through This broke the dam, flooding rock’n’roll with a strain of fury that flowed from riot grrrl to Alanis Morrissette to Paramore to Olivia Rodrigo and beyond. "Just you try to hold me down/Come on try to shut me up," Love snarled on "Gutless." Three decades later, nobody has been able to do either. –Amy Phillips

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Virgin

Having sexually blossomed in public on 1993's janet., Janet Jackson then turned inward to water her spiritual garden, laying out her open invitation during the title track: "Come with me inside/Inside my velvet rope." A meta-meditation on her consciousness, 1997's The Velvet Rope plumbs the depths of Jackson's mind, from love in retrospect ("Got ’Til It's Gone") to love in the metaphysical future ("Together Again"). Here, rope represents not just a relinquished barrier to intimacy, but also a facilitator for bondage play, and the inner world built by Jackson and her trusty collaborators (Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, and then-husband René Elizondo Jr.) is fully realized. Lyrical and musical themes double back and riff off each other throughout; the proto-footwork snare clatter of "Empty," for example, reverberates to much different effect in the album's quiet-storm stunner "Anything." The resulting cohesion is stronger than on any other Jackson album, particularly during Rope's back half, a suite of slow jams that mine facets of a full-blown aesthetic of chill. That Jackson would drop such a mellow and musically daring record after signing what was then the biggest recording contract of all time (an $80 million re-up with Virgin) is a quintessentially Janet move: introverted in its extroversion, the quietest of roars. –Rich Juzwiak

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One Little Independent

Björk immersed herself in London's club scene for her first two solo albums, but by the runup to 1997's Homogenic a string of personal circumstances had given her no shortage of reasons to return to her native Iceland. With volatile electronic elements that Björk has likened to the island nation's active volcanoes, and desolate strings that could conceivably soundtrack an epic Viking film, the album certainly represented a homecoming of sorts. Its title also spoke to Björk's growing control over the creative process, which she used, with collaborators such as Markus Dravs and Mark Bell, to achieve her most unified sonic palette yet. That stately yet unstable setting—Arvo Pärt meets Aphex Twin—adorns some of the often-cryptic lyricist's most arresting statements. She's a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl; a state of emergency is where she wants to be; she knows you can't handle love. When she unloads these epiphanies in her usual gravity-defying manner, as much trapeze artist as vocalist, the sense of adventure is palpable. In the end, much of the album was recorded in Spain—you really can never go home again—and Björk's return to a quieter life turned out to be an even greater journey of discovery. By the time the album wraps with the limpid ecstasy of "All Is Full of Love," it's clear that by going back to where she was from, Björk had found a new way of moving forward. –Marc Hogan

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Loud

With their debut album, Wu-Tang Clan didn't just crash through as a group but as a genre unto itself. Built around its own vernacular, in-house producer RZA's proudly unrefined sonic templates, and every MC's uniquely towering standard of lyrical excellence, the Wu's insular world made little concession to convention. And why should it? As a crew of nine outsiders and industry cast-offs repping NYC's forgotten borough of Staten Island (aka "Shaolin"), self-sufficiency was essential to survival.

This urgency informs every battle-tested couplet, from the throttling salvos of their landmark first single "Protect Ya Neck," which features nearly all of the group's original members, to Ghostface and Raekwon's nostalgic laments on "Can It Be All So Simple," to Method Man and Inspectah Deck's existential introspection on "C.R.E.A.M." "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing Ta F’ Wit," meanwhile, is poetically self-referential on a whole other level: a defiant declaration from consummate rap underdogs rhyming over the sampled theme song to the ’60s cartoon Underdog. Upon its release, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) already sounded legendary. Now, heard as the soundtrack to an origin story of which we know the outcome, its historical legacy equals its undiluted brilliance. –Jeff Mao

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Matador

In college, Liz Phair counted the number of women in an art history textbook and was dismayed by her slim findings. Later, from the fringes of a boys’ club indie scene in Chicago, she wrote Exile in Guyville. The void of female perspectives in popular culture was both her 1993 debut's motivation—Phair positioned it as a counterpoint to an album she deemed canonically male, the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St.—and the reason for its success. In Phair, listeners found an avatar for a sort of female complexity not abundantly visible in the mainstream: vulnerable, bawdy, vengeful, declaring her desire for a boyfriend "and all that stupid old shit" one minute and brushing off emotional intimacy the next. Phair delivers it all in an unimpressed monotone, and she picks at her guitar like a scab—gestures that point to a constant undercurrent of anger, though her arrangements never surpass a low simmer. Rather, it's her words, with their offhanded grace and devastating bluntness, that truly burn. –Olivia Horn

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Parlophone

OK Computer was the last gasp of the rock monoculture: an incontestable, unrepeatable, and critically consecrated masterpiece of a genre that was too big to fail, yet too limp to preside over a new century. Picking up grunge's challenge to macho rock orthodoxy, the bookish Oxford five-piece parlayed corporate resistance and righteous angst into an infernal assessment of mainstream conformism, petit bourgeois inertia, and cartoonish celebrity culture. But where grunge despaired at the gravity of it all, and Britpop buried its head in hedonism, Radiohead made a crucial distinction: Seeing the inferno of modern life in all its grotesque glory was not a curse to endure or escape, but a superpower to wield.

The band enshrined Thom Yorke's feverish proclamations in music so valorizingly grand and emotionally involving it left little room for reflection. The electric guitar had all but lost its anti-authority luster, yet here was Jonny Greenwood, combining Pixies-style fretwork and pedal-board wizardry to remake the instrument as the sound of system collapse. Lurching rhythms and electronics flung us into a kingdom on the fritz, where old-world beauty fractured among broken beats and trip-hop tremors. Yorke belted spittle-flecked barbs about fame, sleaze, and corporate lies like a vanquished revolutionary, adopting a paranoid tenor to name conspiracies that everyone knows to be true: consumerism corrupts, capitalism alienates, technology isolates, et cetera. This dire, depressingly real worldview might have stoked a fire in our bellies. Instead, many of Yorke's disciples were comforted, relieved to feel seen in our infernal little bedrooms and hatchbacks. Rock no longer inspired faith in its revolutionary power, but OK Computer did the next best thing—it made us believe in the spectacle. –Jazz Monroe

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Ruffhouse / Columbia

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the story of a 23-year-old woman experiencing heartbreak and disappointment in a dizzying phase of her life, and choosing to rap about it. Without the backing of her group, the Fugees, a then-pregnant Lauryn Hill allowed herself space to breathe and explore the entirety of her emotions without divorcing those emotions from skill. On her first and only solo studio album, she's wise and unknowing, as sensitive as she is vigorous in explaining her growing pains.

The 1990s weren't exactly an era for harmonized vulnerability in rap, but Hill was so wildly proficient at singing and emceeing—about everything from Moses to star signs—that she created a new love language for a world of Drakes. With Miseducation, her search for desire and spirituality resonated because it was built on a foundation of honesty: songs about obligations to art, men, and motherhood, packaged into a concept album with interludes that treat love as a necessary, amorphous thing. It's the way she cloaks the hurt in daggers on the diss record "Lost Ones," then sings with painful clarity about a relationship's demise on "Ex-Factor," a beautifully clear-headed postmortem. For the length of the album, Hill does the dirty work of facing her feelings, and in the process helps her listeners pick up their own. –Clover Hope

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Creation / Sire

You could say, shrewdly, that Loveless combines two main modalities of the ’90s by being the greatest rock album that is made almost entirely of samples—drum loops, guitar feedback, vocals, all sent through an Akai S1000, which could then be triggered from a keyboard—creating a singular melding of dream-pop and acid-house and hip-hop that defined a new genre called shoegaze. You could say its underlying philosophy remains as relevant as ever: that sleepiness is a largely underrated state of being, that our unconscious impulses are far more truthful than our conscious behavior, that the best music should feel like it could go on forever. You could say that its chief architect, Kevin Shields, is influenced by no one more than fellow Irishman Edmund Burke, the 18th-century philosopher who coined the Romantic ideals of beauty and sublime, and who wrote that the richest emotional response from art comes from the "terrible uncertainty" it can elicit.

At its heart, Loveless is terribly uncertain. It is the primo example of an auteurist studio album—glacially pieced together almost entirely by Shields in and out of British studios across over two years—yet the frontman and producer buries his and Bilinda Butcher's lipless vocals in the middle of the mix to recreate the sound of watching My Bloody Valentine in a loud club. Every pitch on Loveless is imperfect—they are glided into and out of tune using Shields’ whammy bar, or they are at war with themselves, 10 to 15 vocal or guitar tracks buried underneath the lead line creating imperceptible microtonal anomalies. And even though Loveless has become something of an audiophile's totem, Shields himself has said it sounded all right listening to it through his phone speaker. Every time you put on Loveless, the music changes, the emotion shifts, the ceremony is never the same. That's where its power comes from: its reptilian ability to survive and evolve, to stand for the belief that the best albums are not just something you listen to but something you become a part of. –Jeremy D. Larson

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