Top 20: 1990

a variety of morbid symptoms appear

Neil Young, April 1990. (Paul Natkin/Getty Images; sourced from Pitchfork)

Top 20 is a new regular column in which I exhaustively rank the Top 20 records a given year, in chronological order, starting from 1990-2024 and later doubling back to at least 1963. Along the way, we’ll uncover key narratives in pop music history and upend outdated assumptions, rethinking how we got from “there” to “here,” and, hopefully, serving a stewardship role in keeping some of these works and trends from being forgotten much longer. Whether you’re looking for new music or just want to call me an idiot, please subscribe and follow along!

America loves to let popular things outstay their welcome. Four Twilight books became five movies somehow, and then two more books unrelated to those five movies. Keeping Up with the Kardashians went from an E! Network guilty pleasure to twenty seasons and at least eight spinoffs of such bewildering breadth that the title is now a physical impossibility. As of this writing, one long-running spinoff of the Bush-era nerdcom The Big Bang Theory has ended and another is about to start.

Nothing exemplifies both the way America loves extravagantly and its willingness to let guests linger like the 1980s. The era of Gordon Gekko and Stryper was born on November 4, 1980, and hung on until December 26, 1991, when it was quietly laid to rest by Mikhail Gorbachev and possible Kennedy assassination accomplice George H.W. Bush. Culturally, very little separates 1990 from 1989; I can find photos of my parents from when I was born in July of that year with mullets and perms if you don’t believe me.

The roots of the 90s were there, though (so were The Roots of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, although they were three years away from releasing their debut album). The story is that the switchover to the 90s is typified by Kurt Cobain’s ritual disembowelment of Axl Rose on the Billboard charts, but if that’s true then we’re in the doldrums here, between 1987’s Appetite for Destruction and 1991’s Nevermind. What’s the story in between these? What were the last years of the Cold War like for popular music?

To start, it wasn’t really Nirvana who drew first blood on hair metal; it wasn’t even grunge. What actually signaled the end of Sunset Strip glam metal was the rise of thrash, taking punk’s snarling energy and brutal authenticity and combining it with the larger-than-life sonics of metal, making the hair bands look ridiculous and overblown; Mötley Crüe didn’t stand a chance. Four of these iconic thrash records came out in 1990, and are in our Honorable Mentions: Annihilator’s Never, Neverland, Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss, Pantera’s Cowboys from Hell, and Megadeth’s Rust in Peace. It was these more than the woolly-willies of the Pacific Northwest that presaged the end of rock’s dominant 80s form––hard music now was nasty, brutish, and short.

There was another source of early revolution against corporate MTV glam metal: lifers who refused to quit. Rolling Stone couldn’t make heads or tails of fortysomething Lou Reed’s ability to still do something interesting, insisting that longevity and artistic maturity like that achieved by he and John Cale on Songs for Drella were the exclusive province of “bluesman and country greats.” Neil Young and his proto-grunge Crazy Horse, meanwhile, went on to top New York Magazine’s annual Pazz & Jop poll with Ragged Glory, and Paul Simon traded Africa for Brazil on The Rhythm of the Saints. The old guard, for once, was not stepping aside. Aging gracefully, with artistic merit, went hand in hand with the New Authenticity that would define the death of the Reagan ‘80s.

There’s more, obviously––the mainstreaming of punk and post-hardcore, the sleepy awakening of funk-metal hybrids in LA, rap music’s maturation and the early rumblings of the East-West rivalry that would end in tragedy a few years later––but the important story of 1990 is that it’s not actually the beginning of the era; it’s between the couch cushions. The revolution is a still a year away. Now is a time of monsters.

Honorable Mentions:
Jawbreaker, Unfun; Uncle Tupelo, No Depression, Annihilator, Never, Neverland; Caifanes, Vol. 2 (Diablito); Iggy Pop, Brick by Brick; Living Colour, Time’s Up; The Jesus Lizard, Head; Alice in Chains, Facelift; Slayer, Seasons in the Abyss; Bathory, Hammerheart; Midnight Oil, Blue Sky Mining; The Chills, Submarine Bells; Social Distortion, Social Distortion; Killing Joke, Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions; Ween, GodWeenSatan: The Oneness; Paul Simon, The Rhythm of the Saints; Fobia, Fobia; Danzig, Danzig II: Lucifuge; Fugazi, Repeater; A Tribe Called Quest, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm; Primus, Frizzle Fry; Pantera, Cowboys from Hell; The Cramps, Stay Sick!; Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet; Deee-Lite, World Clique; Prince, Graffiti Bridge; Daniel Johnston, 1990; Megadeth, Rust in Peace; LL Cool J, Mama Said Knock You Out; Bob Dylan, Under the Red Sky.

20. Ride – Nowhere. Shoegaze has developed a bit of a reputation for fuzziness––not unearned, perhaps, but incomplete. My Bloody Valentine, to take one example, didn’t just carve soundscapes out of white noise; they wrote catchy songs, too. Oxford natives Ride make a similar statement on this, their debut record: shoegaze can have a backbeat. Perhaps vocalist Andy Bell’s later joining of Oasis as their bassist was already written in the stars, because Nowhere provides the genetic link between The Scene That Celebrates Itself and the Britpop bombast of the later 90s.

The thing about Ride (and MBV), is that these aren’t textures; these are songs. A song like “Seagull” or “Paper Trail” has a structure, lyrics, hooks, chorus. This isn’t to denigrate texture––I love Eno, I love Aphex Twin, I have listened to Merzbow––but the first wave of shoegaze bands demonstrated that textures could go hand-in-hand with the British pop tradition. It’s a reminder that sometimes writing a verse-chorus-verse is a greater avant-garde challenge than abandoning it.

19. They Might Be Giants – Flood. John Linnell and John Flansburgh are a lost type––the melody-obsessed songwriting nerds with the energy of a kid who got a 5 on his AP Bio test but for the way a major turn on a minor chord can create an interesting frisson in the last quarter-beat of the bridge. More than their 90s weirdo-rock contemporaries Primus and Ween (both of whom they predate by a few albums), They Might Be Giants are drunk on the mathematics of songwriting. If Pythagoras started a cult about the pop music of the spheres, this is what their output would sound like.

Now I don’t want to be hyperbolic––I actually prefer both They Might Be Giants and Lincoln to this, their third outing, despite the presence of transcendent singles “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”. That doesn’t matter though––it’s like preferring The Heartbreak Kid to Mikey and Nicky in your Elaine May ranking, in that it’s all pretty damn good. The degrees of difference are not wide, and what I feel Flood lacks in the formal experimentation of the first two it more than makes up for in its boundary-pushing melodies. Also: Steve Burns from Blue’s Clues recorded a cover of “Dead” for a charity compilation many years ago and I prefer it to this version, not least because it’s in 4/4 instead of 6/8.

18. Lou Reed and John Cale – Songs for Drella. Andy Warhol died in 1987 of complications from surgery, at the relatively young age of 58. Frequent collaborator and mentee Lou Reed was convinced that the gallbladder issues that Warhol was hospitalized with were caused by his attempted assassination by Valerie Solanas in 1968; “I believe I would have pulled the switch on her myself,” sings Reed bitterly on “I Believe” from his and John Cale’s Warhol tribute record and musical biography Songs for Drella (the title a reference to Warhol superstar Ondine’s nickname for the visionary artist, a portmanteau of “Dracula” and “Cinderella”). Besides the act of political violence that ruined Warhol’s life, 1968 marked another auspicious occasion: the last time until this record that Reed and Cale collaborated, on the Velvet Underground’s landmark White Light/White Heat. Their re-teaming was big news, and a tour was planned to support this strange, haunting art rock saga. This tour plan was scrapped after Cale announced that he would never work with Reed again, having loathed the experience all over (it didn’t stick; this record led to two brief Velvet Underground reunions, in 1990 and 1993, but after the latter Cale kept to his word).

The album itself still sounds unusual 34 years later, all jangly rhythms and Reed’s hoarse speak-singing, telling the story of Warhol’s life from his upbringing in a “Small Town” right up to the end. Reed and Cale at their best make music that doesn’t sound like anything else, whether it’s a baroque pop concept album about the Paris Peace Conference or the sound of feedback for sixty-four minutes, and although Songs for Drella doesn’t reach the heights of either’s potential, it’s a sad, angry tribute to a titan of twentieth century America, and it doesn’t deserve to have slipped through the cracks the way it has.

17. Sinéad O’Connor – I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” Sinéad intones in the first few seconds of album opener “Feels So Different,” and indeed: the Serenity Prayer seems like an accurate summation of the how the late Irish singer-songwriter lived.

O’Connor is an artist whose artistry has been mostly overshadowed by her personal life, from her infamous 1992 Saturday Night Live appearance ripping up the Pope’s picture (in protest of a then-burgeoning molestation scandal that we now know to have been absolutely correct) to her decision in 2018 to convert to Islam and take on the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat. This is a small injustice in its own way, because O’Connor was a truly singular musical presence in the early 90s. Her Prince-penned hit single “Nothing Compares 2 U” stands on its own as a flawless artifact, but the entirety of I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got surprises in its musical bravado, opening with a nearly seven minute song accompanied only by a string quartet and not letting up from there. There’s significantly more Björk in Sinéad (or rather, vice versa) than is acknowledged; this is the work of a singular artist, a visionary. This is a work that can be appreciated no matter how you approach it, but it deserves to be approached on its own terms. You won’t be disappointed.

16. The La’s – The La’s. The La’s shares a feature with their predecessor on this list: an unfair albatross in a near-era-defining hit single––in this case, So I Married an Axe Murderer-soundtrack standout “There She Goes.” A major icon of the jangle-pop subgenre and a later hit for Sixpence None the Richer, the lovable La’s from Liverpool nonetheless demonstrate a depth on their only album way beyond their only hit. The brainchild of English singer-songwriter Lee Mavers, the La’s kick off a tour-de-force with the opener “Son a Gun,” which is not a cover of the wonderful Vaselines song and yet does not embarrass itself in comparison either.

The record continues in this vein, and if all you know is “There She Goes” you’ll be surprised to hear how muscular and plodding much of this record is––there is a lot more Kinks and Who here than you’d think, soaring choruses and stalking riffs. This record speaks to a theme we’ll touch on again: the many failed Britpops of 1990. The one-and-done La’s show us a distinct one: a Britpop based on “Making Time” riff rock more than Beatles harmonies. The irony, of course, is that it was the least representative song on the record that truly influenced British rock music in the 90s. Ain’t that just the way it goes?

15. Yo La Tengo – Fakebook. After three records of left-of-the-dial fuzz, New Jersey college rock heroes Yo La Tengo tried something new: a 45-minute album of laid-back Americana covers. Like approximately 75% of insane ideas, it worked; in a very real way, Fakebook is the first great Yo La Tengo record, despite the roots of their sound being established in 1986’s very solid Ride the Tiger.

The beating heart of Yo La Tengo is lead singer and guitarist Ira Kaplan’s wavering tenor harmonizing with the confident alto of his wife, drummer and singer Georgia Hubley, and this selection of country and folk covers provide ample opportunity for them to practice this secret weapon. The effect is a kind of indie rock Harvest; even as bubbly a folk-pop hit as Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby” becomes a sugar-sweet vision of bucolic love. Imagine if Paul and Linda McCartney were cynical Mid-Atlantic intellectuals––this would be their Ram.

14. Mazzy Star – She Hangs Brightly. In Kurt Cobain’s posthumously published journals, he names Mazzy Star’s debut record one of his top fifty of all time, and it’s easy to see why. Nothing on She Hangs Brightly is quite as elevating as “Fade Into You” from their follow-up, 1993’s So Tonight That I Might See, but this is still a stunningly self-assured freshman outing from the Santa Monica dream-poppers. Mazzy Star was born out of the ashes of Paisley Underground scenesters Opal, who released one record (1987’s Happy Nightmare Baby), fell apart, and then mostly reformed, replacing their singer Kendra Smith with from the Dream Syndicate with East LA native Hope Sandoval, whose sultrier, stranger vocals fit the developing sound of the band perfectly. They set out to make this record and landed two hits out of it: Slapp Happy cover “Blue Flower,” which reached number 29 on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, and “Halah,” which would follow “Fade Into You”’s coattails to number 19 three years later.

There’s a bit more Americana, even country, in She Hangs Brightly than is typical for the scene they emerged out of, much of which is courtesy of late guitarist David Roback’s slide technique, itself cribbed from the Doors’ Robby Krieger. This helps turn Mazzy Star into something special––purveyors of a certain kind of dark LA sound, hazy and lost and stoned and beautiful. Lana Del Rey clearly took notes.

13. Redd Kross – Third Eye. Redd Kross, a band of brothers from Hawthorne, California that started when bassist Steve McDonald was still in middle school, began their career as a Weezer-style pop culture assessed hardcore punk band, releasing their debut album Born Innocent in 1986 as Red Cross (supposedly named in honor of an infamous scene in The Exorcist, whose star, Linda Blair, is the namesake of that album’s opener). Covering songs from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the Rolling Stones, and Charles Manson, Red Cross immediately announced themselves as smart-alecky and self-aware in a distinctly Gen X way. The album got some attention upon release––at least, enough for the International Red Cross to threaten legal action if they didn’t change their name, which they promptly (kind of) did.

Some of you might be familiar with this record, or have thrown it on to check it out after seeing it here. If you did, you’ve heard anthemic power pop and 70s arena riff rock, even a pitch-perfect impression of Paul Stanley from KISS on “1976,” and are probably wondering what the hell I’m talking about calling this a hardcore punk band. It wasn’t uncommon for some of the first-wave hardcore kids to expand their horizons; although it was just as militant and closed-off a scene then as it is now, it was before the pure aestheticization of scenes, and a kid might end up watching shitty hardcore bands play for free in suburban garages because there’s nothing really else to do in some of the sleepier exurbs of Southern California (I am speaking from experience here). This meant that some of those first-gen hardcore kids would have their horizons expanded and move on from the genre. This is actually part of why Minor Threat broke up, and you can hear it in one of their last songs, “Salad Days”; half of the band had gotten into U2 and the other half thought it was corny. Of course, Ian MacKaye, in the firmly anti-U2 camp, would go on to expand his horizons with the dub melodicism of Fugazi just as much. That’s how it goes, and how it went for Redd Kross, rediscovering the Beatles and glam rock of their youth and suffusing it into their sound on 1987’s Neurotica, and then finally going full bubblegum here on Third Eye. The impact is direct and immediate: they’re a much better band than their copyright-unfriendly first iteration as a hardcore outfit. Full of soaring hooks and air-guitar worthy sonic textures, Third Eye is a sugary blast of mid-70s rock, like if ELO’s Jeff Lynne joined “Hair of the Dog” rockers Nazareth.

After a seven-year hiatus from 1997-2004, Redd Kross is back and still touring. In fact, they just had a documentary about them premiere earlier this year, also called Born Innocent, as well as a perfectly fine self-titled record. The McDonald brothers have gone from snot-nosed punk kids to power pop elder statesmen, and it’s a testament to their constant search for self-actualization that they let themselves go from opening for Black Flag to this record in just five years.

12. Pet Shop Boys – Behaviour. Pet Shop Boys frontman Neil Tennant also worked as a music journalist, and coined the phrase “imperial phase” to describe the kind of Augustinian success enjoyed by the likes of Eras era Taylor Swift, initially in reference to his own band’s 1988 in the UK, around the release of their record Introspective and its lead single “Domino Dancing” (to American ears, this timing is odd to me; I’ve always associated Pet Shop Boys with their 1986 debut Please and its hits “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” and “West End Girls.” But I guess it’s not really for me to say, is it?). My mathematically-minded readers will immediately notice that 1988 is two years before 1990 (and 1986 is 4!) and alas, it’s true: Behaviour is a post-imperial release. Imagine the egg on Tennant’s face when he nonetheless released a back-to-front great record.

I’ll admit: no song on the album reaches the height of opener and lead single “Being Boring,” a scientifically-precise slice of pop perfection. But with hits like these, who needs album tracks? And the album tracks themselves are still great, especially B-side “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?,” which turns the thirteen-syllable phrase of the title into a catchy guitar-sample-driven hook.

Like any empire, Pet Shop Boys proved to be an institution worth engaging with at any point in their development. 1990 may not be the peak, but for some bands even the downslope is higher than their rivals’ top heights.

11. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Good Son. All hauntings start with God, either his absence or his overweening presence. This is a key aspect of Gothic metaphysics, and it suffuses the classics of the genre from Emily Brönte’s divine mystery on the moors to the demon-king Count Dracula. Many latter-day goths eschew this, severing their memento mori obsession from its spiritual roots. That’s as fine as far as it goes, if not a reason why goth culture might be a little hollow these days––but not for Nick Cave. The former Birthday Party frontman knows from haunting, and he’ll make sure you know it too.

There’s tragedy in Cave’s future, which we’ll get to in future installments of this column, but he sings on The Good Son as if he already knows, whether it’s the title track or lead single “The Weeping Song”. It’s the opener, though, “Foi Na Cruz,” that is the Rosetta Stone––and like any good Rosetta Stone, it’s not in English. “It was on the cross,” sings Cave in Portuguese, the native tongue of Brazil, where he had moved to and married in during the recording of this record, “it was on the cross / that one day / my sins were punished in Jesus.” This is not a public declaration of faith; this is the same Nick Cave who, seven years later, will bluntly open a major single with the line “I don’t believe in an interventionist God.” Instead, it’s Cave acknowledging a truth too scary even for goths: God may or may not be real, but either way he’s got his eye on you.

10. Happy Mondays – Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches. Much of Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People revolves around the sharp, dangerous energy that Shaun Ryder, Bez, and the rest of the Happy Mondays crew brought to Tony Wilson’s Haçienda scene in the Manchester of the late 80s and early 90s. The acid house-centric Second Summer of Love had died in the United Kingdom by 1990, and in a way the drug-fueled decadence and chaos typified by Ryder (who was described in a 2022 Daily Mirror retrospective as having “a cocktail of booze, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and marijuana” after nearly every show on the Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches support tour) was a postmodern rave-up echo of the Mansonite darkness that killed the first Summer of Love two decades earlier. First as tragedy, then as farce.

Not that the bleak desperation behind the scenes made it on to wax––from its first track and second single, the “Lady Marmalade”-interpolating “Kinky Afro,” Happy Mondays’ debut record is a head-bopping kaleidoscope of processed drums, Fripp guitars, and dancer/human mascot Bez’s maracas. The entire record is a revelation, a burst of Ibiza sun cutting through the same rain-soaked soil that Morrissey moped over. The defining work of the Madchester microgenre, Happy Mondays would prefigure genre-busting British artists like Gorillaz, who enlisted Ryder to sing on “Dare” from 2005’s Demon Days. English music in the 90s would go in a different direction than the one pointed at here, into the Kinks and Beatles pastiches of Britpop, and maybe that’s for the best given what the Madchester lifestyle did to its participants, but it’s not difficult to imagine a world where Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches became the fountainhead that Definitely Maybe was instead, and if not safer, that world is at least a lot groovier.

9. Pixies – Bossanova. You could make the argument that each Pixies album is defined by a feeling––Surfer Rosa is afraid, Doolittle is angry, and Bossanova is joyous. There’s always been a little surf in the band, but it takes center stage to rapturous effect here, crashing in with a cover of the Surftones’ “Cecilia Ann” right at the top. Easily the most mainstream and accessible of the band’s work, this seems to have led many critics to discount it in comparison to its predecessors. This is wrong.

Bossanova proves something that alternative and independent rock was still proving in the 80s: that loud(-quiet-loud), abrasive, sharp music of the underground could be just as catchy and fun as any pop record released that year. It’s almost an accident of its creation: coming off a near-breakup in Germany in 1989 (during which frontman Black Francis threw a guitar at bassist Kim Deal in Stuttgart, and the latter nearly fired after refusing to play a show in Frankfurt) and three-quarters of the band, all except Deal (who instead formed the Breeders with her twin sister in Ohio), relocating to Los Angeles in 1990, the record was mostly written by Francis in-studio, channeling his love for Brian Wilson pop hooks with increasingly esoteric subject matter and artsy influences, from the Rosicrucian UFO obsessive subject of “Velouria” to the Talking Heads pastiche “Dig for Fire.” The album was a success, reaching number 70 on the charts in the United States and all the way to number 3 in the United Kingdom, and kept the band alive for a follow-up, 1992’s underwhelming Trompe le Monde, but the writing was on the wall. After forty years in the desert, Pixies were not to see the Promised Land––alternative rock would be defined by their spiritual children Nirvana, and they’d all go their separate ways for more than a decade.

8. Neil Young + Crazy Horse – Ragged Glory. Let me tell you something that is not accurate to say: it would not be accurate to say that Neil Young + Crazy Horse invented grunge. This was a beloved argument of 90s rock critic nerd types, but it doesn’t really track. Is there a shared lineage? Sure, but no more than there is with grunge and Creedence Clearwater Revival. A lot of heartland rockers who wore authenticity on their sleeve influenced grunge. Why give Neil the sole credit?

Here’s something else that is accurate to say: there are moments in Ragged Glory where it feels like he can answer that question. New York Magazine’s annual Pazz & Jop poll––at this point still overseen by “the dean of American rock critics” Robert Christgau––voted Ragged Glory the best album of 1990, and although some future observers have expressed surprise, in a way it’s very prescient. Neil Young may not have started grunge, but fuzzy, languorous laments wailed and mumbled over a heavy rhythm section isn’t not Gen X’s favorite genre, and Young, having experimented with distorted textures before most of his peers, was uniquely positioned to lead this charge.

So here’s something else that is not accurate to say: I always know what I’m talking about. Maybe my instinct above is wrong. Maybe we should credit Neil Young (+ Crazy Horse) with inventing grunge. Someone had to do it, I guess, right? Why not Neil?

These are not questions you ponder listening to Ragged Glory. It pushes them out of your mind completely. More than anything, that might be the greatest thing about it. In the age of social media, in a time where someone like me can listen to every record ever and rank them and release that ranking and get called a subliterate moron on the internet for it, there’s power to a work that can still figure out a way to stand on itself, to speak for itself. Ragged Glory resists context, which makes me think it belongs to the grunge generation after all.

7. Angelo Badalamenti – Soundtrack from Twin Peaks. There’s a scene in David Lynch’s titanic third season of Twin Peaks from 2017 when Dana Ashbrook, playing former bad boy turned sheriff’s deputy Bobby Briggs, comes across laid-out evidence from the 1989 death and disappearance of his then-girlfriend Laura Palmer. He’s immediately driven to tears by it, having not engaged with this trauma in decades––and, for the first time in the entire revival, we hear Angelo Badalamenti’s “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” the iconic, stirring, tragic leitmotif of the fallen teen. Lynch knew how to precision-strike this needle-drop, and he knew the power of Badalamenti’s dream-pop score.

Dreamy jazz-inflected American music was burbling around a lot in the late 80s and early 90s and occasionally burst into the mainstream, like in future Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me star Chris Isaak’s Roy Orbison-esque “Wicked Game”, which was featured in Lynch’s Wild at Heart this same year. Brooklyn-born composer Angelo Badalamenti had worked in the 70s, but his big break, like Isaak’s, came at the nicotine-stained fingertips of David Lynch, who hired him to be Isabella Rossellini’s vocal coach for Blue Velvet (1986) and then recruited him for this, the score for 1990’s most groundbreaking and influential esoteric procedural soap opera send-up. The centerpieces are the opener and closer, the near-identical “Twin Peaks Theme” and “Falling,” the latter a collaboration with singer Julee Cruise which was released as a single in 1989 and became as surprise a hit as the show itself.

The rest of the album is just as compelling as “Twin Peaks Theme” and “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” a collection of jazzy, twinkly, dreamy instrumentals and two more collaborations with Cruise, all three of which have lyrics written by Lynch. An example of how the intensely particular often ages better than the self-consciously general, the fruit of this three-way collaboration sounds just as fresh now as it did then, and with the loss of both Badalamenti and Cruise in the years since, we’re guaranteed not to see its likes again. Damn fine record.

6. Cocteau Twins – Heaven or Las Vegas. It’s important for the reader to understand that I very much enjoy Beach House and the like before I say what I’m about to say. Okay? We’re good? Okay: Heaven or Las Vegas is the only dream-pop record that is completely necessary. It’s probably the only dream-pop record that has ever mattered. If this were the only representative of the genre that has ever existed on Earth, it would not be a colossal loss, because everything else is in here somewhere.

I don’t want to sound hyperbolic. I’m just trying to say that Heaven or Las Vegas is one of those genre-defining records that should’ve been imprinted in its entirety on the Voyager Golden Records and launched into space so that advanced alien civilizations can form themselves around trying to figure out whatever the fuck Elizabeth Fraser is saying all over this thing. Opener “Cherry-Coloured Funk” immediately sucks you into their swirling, flanged world, and there’s never an opportunity to escape. It’s a near-spiritual experience: to listen to Cocteau Twins is to give yourself over entirely to a brand new understanding of the world. You’ll learn the language eventually.

5. Prefab Sprout – Jordan: The Comeback. Many consider this Prefab Sprout’s masterpiece; I do not. That’s still 1985’s Steve McQueen for me. Both records are of a piece, though, and both are excellent. Both produced by Thomas Dolby (“She Blinded Me with Science”), both are essential showcases of frontman Paddy McAloon’s sophisti-pop bona fides.

At 19 tracks and more than an hour long, Jordan: The Comeback is the sprawling, ambitious work of a master of his craft. Divided into four distinct thematic segments (pop songs, a suite about Elvis, love songs, and a section on “death and fate”), the album was hailed as a masterpiece upon its release, eliciting comparisons to The White Album and Sign ‘o’ the Times. You’d think such a work would have lasted the test of time, but its singles (“Looking for Atlantis” and “We Let the Stars Go”) withered on the vine and the record ended up like Ozymandias’ likeness under quiet desert sands. Like other would-be McCartneys of the late twentieth century (including the tragic Badfinger frontman and 27 Club member Pete Ham, who actually worked with Paul McCartney), Paddy McAloon became a footnote in pop music history rather than the giant he seemed promised to be.

Let’s not succumb to cynicism, though; this is a wonderful record, and if not quite The White Album it certainly deserves to be recognized as a major work of thoughtful, sophisticated art pop, taking wide swings on subject matter like back-to-back reflections on Old West outlaw and Confederate bushwhacker Jesse James and sonic influences as wide as Sly Stone (“Machine Gun Ibiza”) and Stephen Sondheim (“All the World Loves Lovers”). That Paddy McAloon did not become Paul McCartney is not an indictment of his talent; most people do not become Paul McCartney (technically, every single human being that’s ever lived minus one did not become Paul McCartney). When a great album is forgotten, it should not be mourned, it should be remembered. Precious metals wait in the rock until a miner finds them. Never stop diggin’.

4. Depeche Mode – Violator. Depeche Mode songwriter Martin Gore described the novel approach to recording Violator to the NME like so: “Over the last five years I think we’d perfected a formula; my demos, a month in the programming studio, etc. etc. We decided that our first record of the ‘90s ought to be different.” And it was so––Violator is a major step forward for the British synth-pop icons, a clear evolution from 1987’s Music for the Masses but still a more muscular and foreboding lament of life and death and God and truth than any of their previous work.

Four singles were released from this record, and although all are excellent three of them are truly transformative: “Personal Jesus,” “Enjoy the Silence,” and “Policy of Truth.” Each of these, recorded under the watchful eye of the mononymous Flood, represent a band arguably reaching their artistic pinnacle, confident and fierce in their ability to construct pulsating melodies that burrow into your brain and don’t let go. Endlessly listenable, with unfolding layers of complexity and artistry, Violator is clearly the peak of Depeche Mode’s career.

That’s the thing about peaks, though: there’s nowhere to go but down. Triple platinum and peaking at number 7 on the Billboard 200, Depeche Mode began the 90s as conquerors, but internal tensions would lead to the band fumbling throughout the decade. Although 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion was a financial success, founding member Alan Wilder was out of the band by 1995, and they continued as a trio until Andy Fletcher’s death in 2022. They continued to release respectable records before and after Fletcher’s death, but nothing has come close to this, the sound of a band at the top of their game, defining dark, moody British synth-pop for a generation.

3. The Sundays – Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. There’s a temptation to treat the Sundays as a prophetic-perfect-tense Belle and Sebastian––so certain are they of the coming of the Scottish indie-pop phenoms that they play as if they are already them. Where there’s smoke there’s certainly some fire; Harriet Wheeler bends and spirals her melodies in a distinctly Stuart Murdochian way, and the dreamy invitation of the music itself is shy flirtation in a university library in much the same way If You’re Feeling Sinister will be a few years later. This is a disservice, though; as usual, you’re best off respecting the causal relationship of linear time.

The Sundays started at Bristol University in the late 80s, when English major Harriet Wheeler met and fell in love with Romance languages student David Gavurin. After graduation, the pair lived on unemployment benefits and wrote songs, and after a bidding war on their demos signed with Rough Trade who released this: thirty-eight minutes and twenty-three seconds of dreamy indie-pop perfection. The first three tracks (“Skin & Bones” and lead singles “This is Where the Story Ends” and “Can’t Be Sure”) are the standouts, but chances are by the time these three are done you’re in their world. Let it wash over you.

2. Jellyfish – Bellybutton. I hate to let a reader peek behind the petticoats here but a major aspect of the liminality that we’ve been exploring is the unasked question of “What will rock music become?” after the bloated excess of 80s pop metal (which in turn inherited their mantle from the hirsute excesses of 70s arena rock). In the opening essay, we talked about how thrash drew first blood and grunge came out on top, but whether it’s shoegaze or dream pop or jangly proto-Britpop, we’ve seen many others come for the throne and fall short. Jellyfish––perhaps more consigned to the dustbin of history than any other band on this list––provides us with a final 1990 path-not-taken.

These San Francisco power poppers, led by the duo of singer-drummer Andy Sturmer (perhaps now best known as the writer and producer for 2000s Japanese pop band PuffyAmiYumi) and keyboardist-singer Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (who would go on to release three better-in-theory-than-in-praxis synth covers album as the Moog Cookbook), dared to ask whether the path towards the future might be in Bowie, the Beach Boys, and XTC, and set to work putting together the most intricately crafted and catchy power pop record since Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces (1979).

It wasn’t to be. The highest-charting single off this record, “This is Why,” got to number 11 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart, but that alone does not a career make. The influence of Jellyfish (who would release only one more record, 1993’s Spilt Milk) was not to be felt on the charts, but in the underground. Precocious indie rock types later in the 90s would embrace exactly the same set of influences as Jellyfish, leading to the founding of the Olivia Tremor Control, of Montreal, and the entire Elephant 6 Collective. Although Elephant 6’s biggest names (like Neutral Milk Hotel) are folksier and less directly descended from the Todd Rundgren pop of some of their peers, in a way Jellyfish represented a bridge from the heyday of the Raspberries to power pop’s underground phase, where it mutated with indie rock and anti-folk and would eventually help lay out the runway for artists like Arcade Fire and Sufjan Stevens. Far from a historical footnote, in a real way the harmonics and symphonics of 2000s-era indie twee probably don’t happen, or at least don’t develop the same, without the Benedictine preservation of the catchy old ways.

And even if you think that stuff’s annoying, trust me when I say that Bellybutton is a record worth a few spins and a place in the canon.

1. Sonic Youth – Goo. No band in America defined indie rock in the 1980s more than Sonic Youth. The hipper-than-thou quartet (at this point made up of then-husband-and-wife duo Thurston Moore on vocals and guitar and Kim Gordon on vocals and bass, plus sonic experimentalist Lee Ranaldo on guitar and human metronome Steve Shelly on drums) was the lodestar for every young alternative rock band in the late 80s, having released records like Sister and EVOL on Greg Ginn from Black Flag’s label SST and their most acclaimed album Daydream Nation on Enigma in 1988. To sign with David Geffen, then, whose new DGC Records imprint had distribution from Warner Bros. and is now owned by Universal, was one of the first great betrayals of the indie world, and hipsters were ready to greet Goo with jeers and dismissive eye-rolls.

They never got the chance, because Goo rocks, and it was immediately obvious on release that it rocks. Despite going for more hooks than Daydream Nation (and finding them, from the slinky riff that drives “Dirty Boots” to the Chuck D-featuring single “Kool Thing”, which was also prominently featured in Hal Hartley’s 1992 indie flick Simple Men), this sixth outing from the New York iconoclasts doesn’t really sand off any of their edges, indulging in many of the same textural noise shenanigans as their earlier work and still engaging with tragic pop culture figures like Karen Carpenter (“Tunic (Song for Karen)”) and Joan Crawford’s Academy Award winning turn as noir leading lady in the eponymous Mildred Pierce (“Mildred Pierce”).

What Goo does more than anything is provide an answer for our question before: what will rock music be? It so happens that in this case the answer is also the single finest record of the year, but that’s not a given. Alternative rock will be this: buzzsaw guitars, giant rhythm sections, and laconic, ironic, hurt vocals; Year Zero nihilists with extensive record collections going back to the Delta Blues; kiss-off punk kids with an encyclopedic knowledge of ABBA singles. The 90s are the alternative era, yes, but the alternative is not really the counterculture anymore. Every indie rocker will sign to their personal Geffens and a million Buddy Holly frames will be donned, and every adenoidal, warbly voice will rise in praise. The kool thing culture of the 90s is brought into being on Goo, and every Kurt and Courtney will be in its shadow.

For now, at least.