In retrospect, 1998 feels like a music year in transition. In the mainstream, the surge of “alternative” music energy that had powered the first half of the ’90s was starting to fizzle; grunge had been fully co-opted, and nü-metal was ascendant. The tide of the CD boom was still lifting all boats, even as Napster and mp3s were right around the corner, and teen pop was about to have its big moment. Mixtapes were still being traded and everyone had a cassette deck, perhaps the last one they would ever own. Below the radar, the underground was healthy: Independent labels were roaring, and some of the bigger ones were still living large on the cash they’d made earlier in the decade, when they served as farm teams for major-label-bound acts. Out in the world, fans were starting to build communities electronically—including those reading a two-year-old electronic zine called Pitchfork—and Google would debut later in the year. And there were many great records that stuck with us, that defined this era and remained timeless.
Experiencing music in 2018 means being bombarded with new and rediscovered music simultaneously. Here at Pitchfork, now that we’re 22 years young, we thought it would be fun to look at the albums of 1998 and rank our favorites. Our voters for the list were a mix of those who were engaged critically with music that year and those who’ve learned about much of it in hindsight. (And some of our favorite releases from the year—including DJ Shadow’s Preemptive Strike, the Beta Band’s The Three EPs, and Stereolab’s Aluminum Tunes—were excluded because they were collections of material released earlier.) Here’s how we hear 1998 now.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and our Apple Music playlist.
Devin the Dude: The Dude
It’s difficult for rap to sound timeless. The genre changes with the wind and, as a result, its most exciting artists often burn bright and fast. Rappers from hip-hop’s earlier days may have been foundational, but their sound can feel dated. If you have any doubt, ask Lil Yachty what he thinks of Biggie.
But then there’s Devin the Dude, the cover of whose self-titled debut album featured him sitting on the toilet, smoking a joint, and reading the newspaper like the carefree legend he was. Sounding like a muppet with a cold, the Houston-based Devin raps about his devotion to marijuana and watching the world go by. The beats are slinky funk, as Pharrell as they are Funkadelic. It’s a singular album, a delightful listen that carves out a hip-hop niche still his own two decades later. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Devin the Dude, “Sticky Green” [ft. Scarface]
Windy & Carl: Depths
In the 1980s and early 1990s, dream-pop and shoegaze taught listeners that sweet melodies could be cloaked in tendrils of swirling noise. Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren were drone explorers who took that notion a step further, conducting atmospheric guitar drifts that maintained both structure and sweeping emotion. Their fourth album and Kranky Records debut, Depths, veers between ethereal instrumentals and hazily murmured songs—a bit like Deerhunter’s Cryptograms-era interludes mixed with Grouper’s abstract lullabies, to name two Kranky signees that followed. Depths is 70 minutes in length—with little more than guitar, bass, voice, and who knows how many effect pedals—but Windy & Carl fill up their vast canvas with coolly shimmering tones too songlike to be conventionally ambient, too ambient to be conventionally songs. Like certain paintings in the modern art wing of a museum, it might look like an undifferentiated block of color from a distance, but it’s endlessly absorbing once you’ve stepped in close. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Windy & Carl, “Undercurrent”
RZA: Bobby Digital in Stereo
RZA’s first solo album came from a forsaken place. After dedicating years of his life to defining the Wu-Tang Clan’s grainy aesthetic, the rapper and producer born Bobby Diggs grew dismayed when his crew started to splinter. Faced with such ungratefulness, he thought, “Let me show these motherfuckers.” His anarchic alter ego was born.
A hood superhero in a dollar-store party mask, Bobby Digital’s origin story involves honey-dipped blunts and a quest to offer internet access to poor neighborhoods worldwide. (He once said the whole idea “came from a really good bag of weed.”) During this period of indulgence, RZA’s fantasies blurred into his real life, to the extent that he claimed to have actually spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a bomb-proof Digimobile as well as a crusader’s outfit that could repel machine gun bullets. Bobby Digital in Stereo is full of boasts so outlandish, they might give Diddy pause, instead of offering the sorts of philosophical bars RZA was known for. And the beats trade out some of his signature grit and sampling for bizarre keyboard bleeps and bloops, making the album something of an outlier amid the expanded Wu universe. It’s a barrage of psychedelic id from one of the decade’s most potent eccentrics. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: RZA, “Domestic Violence”
Bright Eyes: Letting Off the Happiness
Before Conor Oberst fell into Americana, he was a teenager in his bedroom etching raw, unearthly songs into a four-track tape machine. Released when he was 18 years old, Bright Eyes’ first proper studio album, Letting Off the Happiness, pried open the psyche of a kid who already felt the worse for wear. The songs that aren’t about death and dying tend to be about paralyzing loneliness and troubled relationships: Oberst is abandoned by his friends on “Contrast and Compare.” He’s taking too many pills and seeing dead babies in the bathroom on “Padraic My Prince.” He’s sleeping with someone he’d really rather not be sleeping with on “A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction.” Though his lyrics aligned with common emo sentiment, Oberst favored keyboards and tape loops over electric guitars, rendering Letting Off the Happiness a strange electroacoustic rag doll of disparate styles and techniques. His lyrics and the raw desperation in his voice struck a nerve among his fellow sad teens, many of whom might have been learning for the first time that music didn’t have to be polished or palatable. It could be a deranged document of your worst fears strung together in a basement on ramshackle equipment, just so long as it rang true. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Bright Eyes, “Contrast and Compare”
Blonde Redhead: In an Expression of the Inexpressible
With In an Expression of the Inexpressible, Blonde Redhead rid themselves of the downtown grit embedded in their earlier work, and they began to draft a more romantic and uncharacteristically lustrous version of the Sonic Youth mimesis of their first three albums. Blonde Redhead's signature remains their symbiosis, and their tight-knit songwriting was already apparent here—lead guitarist and vocalist Amedeo Pace and drummer Simone Pace are twin brothers; Amedeo and rhythm guitarist/lead vocalist Kazu Makino were in love.
For In an Expression, the group found a kindred spirit in producer Guy Picciotto, who himself had transitioned from the scrappy, guttural output of Rites of Spring to the more austere punk of Fugazi. The tumbling percussion on “Suimasen” and “Luv Machine,” the pulsing guitar harmonies on “Led Zep,” the desperate wails on the title track—they would have suited Blonde Redhead’s previous records, but here they were executed with new finesse. Together, the four put a finer focus on their erratic, eccentric tunes, making In an Expression sound intentional and brilliant. –Claire Lobenfeld
Listen: Blonde Redhead, “Luv Machine”
GAS: Königsforst
Outside Cologne, a woodland called Königsforst encompasses 7,500 acres of tall, skinny trees and tranquil bodies of water. As a teenager, the Kompakt co-founder and minimalist techno pioneer Wolfgang Voigt wandered this terrain while tripping on acid. The best known of his many aliases, GAS, approximates that experience. By layering stretched-out samples of German classical music over 4/4 kick-drum beats, Voigt unites the majesty of nature and the weight of tradition with the physicality of the club. The intoxicating results are slow and fast, meditative and propulsive, timeless and futuristic at once.
Although the entire GAS oeuvre is rooted in Königsforst, the album that bears its name is the most reflective and organic of Voigt’s many releases under the moniker. Each track conjures a different forest landscape: “Königsforst 1” throbs with the exhilaration of a sunrise run, static crunching like autumn leaves underfoot. The swollen strings of “Königsforst 3” have the foreboding aura of a journey into the darkest reaches of the woods. And the awe-inspiring “Königsforst 5” captures the GAS ethos in miniature, a pas de deux between distorted horns and insistent drums that dissolves into a swirling, psychedelic reverie. –Judy Berman
Listen: GAS, “Königsforst 1”
Theo Parrish: First Floor
Disco edits have long been the secret weapon of club DJs; these specially spliced takes of familiar tunes bear the DJ or producer’s own sensibilities, offering up versions that can only be heard when that talent is on the decks. Detroit’s Theo Parrish revealed himself to be an idiosyncratic craftsman of these from the start, his early singles full of wobbly yet entrancing edits that strayed from archetypal house music towards old funk, soul, and jazz. First Floor, Parrish’s debut album, takes the disco edit into heady new territory, shipping the likes of Luther Vandross, Nina Simone, and James Brown into spacey new surroundings. As he loops lithe basslines, needling guitar licks, head-nodding electric organ chords, and famous guttural shouts to the point of mesmerism, Theo isn’t content to just pay tribute to the past. Rather, he reveals that there was always plenty of space between house, acid, and techno for electronic music producers to move about. –Andy Beta
Listen: Theo Parrish, “Sweet Sticky”
Maxwell: Embrya
The term “neo-soul” was only a few years old by 1998, but the genre’s biggest stars were already feeling boxed in by it. Perhaps none were quite as pigeonholed as Maxwell, whose 1996 debut, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, was a magnet for comparisons to Marvin Gaye, Prince, and Stevie Wonder—none of them inaccurate, per se, but collectively they cast an impression of the singer as a standard-issue revivalist. With his dense, divisive sophomore outing, Embrya, Maxwell made it clear that he wasn’t trying to recreate his influences: He was trying to top them.
A paradox of easy grooves and difficult accompaniments, composed as if repurposed from fragments of far less cluttered songs, Embrya confounded critics and listeners alike with its new age spiritualism, florid production, unhurried pacing, and submerged melodies. Every track is swollen past the seams with flourishes. There’s a magnificently seductive three-and-a-half-minute song at the core of “Everwanting: To Want You to Want,” but the song rides out for twice that length, letting each of Maxwell’s session musicians get a few extra licks in. Yet as ponderous and unabashedly pretentious as Embrya could be, even at its slowest, it absolutely knocks, thanks to the bottomless basslines that reverberate through the wah-wah guitars, clipped horns, flutes, and celestial strings that cushion the most remote crevices of these songs. Even when Maxwell was trying to challenge the masses, he sounded gorgeous doing it. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen: Maxwell, “Everwanting: To Want You to Want”
Mouse on Mars: Glam
By 1998, the German production duo Mouse on Mars had established themselves with three full-lengths that mixed techno, dub, pop, and ambient. Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma’s music was shimmery and bright and often a little goofy, marking them as playful electronic experimenters who colored well outside the lines. For Glam, they tried something different. Originally commissioned and then rejected as a soundtrack for a widely panned and rarely seen film (it starred Tony Danza, which was a more interesting factoid 20 years ago), Glam veers from wispy new age to jet-black dark ambient to crunchy industrial. Foregoing their song-oriented approach for immersive exercises in mood and shade, St. Werner and Toma wound up with an ambient masterpiece that is still their finest record. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Mouse on Mars, “Glim”
Jeff Buckley: Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk
Jeff Buckley has been thoroughly deified in the two decades since he died, but he has also been minimized—his creativity condensed into haunted eyes and high cheekbones, that sky-piercing vocal on “Hallelujah,” and a fateful accident. But Buckley was too swift a mind, too keen an ear to be boxed in; when he drowned at age 30, midway through the sessions for his second album, he left a dozen paths still to explore. Folk martyrdom was the least of them.
Buckley, then a modest success, probably would have done a lot of paring and pruning before releasing My Sweetheart the Drunk; as its rough etchings suggest now, he was ferocious with ideas still unfurling. Where his debut, Grace, was a savvy braiding of psychedelic hard-rock, minimalist pop balladry, and grunge ardor, the Sweetheart sessions stew with more heat and less cohesion, delighted in the avant-garde eccentricity culled from downtown New York clubs. (Leonard Cohen never covered Genesis by yodeling about a “fluffy heart” and porcupines over a scrum of atonal guitars.) It’s odd to reconcile Buckley’s pristine popular legacy with hearing him trill through the prog thrum of “The Sky Is a Landfill,” purr through the ominous madrigal “You & I,” and torch Nirvana guitar riffs in “Nightmares By the Sea.” But his pop ear endures, too, in bare moments like “Everybody Here Wants You,” a balletic soul jam. It’s heartbreaking that so many doors were open to him, now forever shut. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Jeff Buckley, “The Sky Is a Landfill”
The Smashing Pumpkins: Adore
If Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness didn’t shake off all the Smashing Pumpkins’ lingering associations with grunge, then its dark and stormy followup, Adore, sure did. Grunge may have channeled the alternative into the mainstream, but the Pumpkins more accurately predicted what rock music would sound like in 20 years. On Adore, they fused sweeping melodramatic gestures with modest drum machines and tinny production effects. It was as if bandleader Billy Corgan wanted to highlight the profundity of his grief—he had just lost his mother, the subject of the eight-minute power ballad “For Martha”—with the mundanity of the world in which he still had to live. But as chintzy as those electronics sound by today’s standards, the Pumpkins used them to devastating effect: to simulate the whiplash passage of time on “Appels + Oranjes,” to indicate the delicate, transient nature of love on “Perfect.” Now that rock bands are as comfortable with loops and software plugins as they are with guitars, Adore sounds remarkably prescient. If it was out of place in 1998, it was only because it belonged to the future. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: The Smashing Pumpkins, “Perfect”
A Tribe Called Quest: The Love Movement
In 1996, A Tribe Called Quest released their least-loved album, Beats, Rhymes & Life—an inexplicably sour, sobering record that dialed down the group’s usually joyful jazz-rap. Two years later, they announced their breakup. The fifth and final record of their original run together, The Love Movement didn’t immediately buy them back the goodwill they’d lost with Beats, but in hindsight it vindicated some of the musical ideas they’d workshopped on that effort. Featuring J Dilla, young and just coming into his own, Q-Tip’s Ummah production team refined their woozy bass and harsh snare cracks into something far warmer and more alluring, channeling the muted, modernist thump of the era’s great neo-soul albums.
On The Love Movement, the music is suave but the mood is light. Whatever their differences outside of the studio, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg sounded like old chums again, wing-manning for each other on “Find a Way” and “Against the World,” cracking each other up with self-effacing tales of conquests. The real love at the center of The Love Movement isn’t the transformational love of hip-hop, nor is it the romantic love of soul mates: It’s the love between these two childhood friends. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen: A Tribe Called Quest, “Find a Way”
Gastr Del Sol: Camoufleur
At the end of “The Season Reverse,” the opening track of Gastr Del Sol’s final album, firecrackers that sound initially like just another percussive element reveal themselves to be part of a field-recorded conversation with French-speaking children. Camoufleur reveals its other pleasures like that, too: gradually yet exhilaratingly. Gastr Del Sol centered around two avant-rock fixtures with impressive pedigrees, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke, and they often recorded with another, Tortoise’s John McEntire. Formed out of the fertile Chicago indie-rock scene in the 1990s, they became known for their complex, frequently acoustic explorations.
Camoufleur united the group with yet another left-field luminary, Markus Popp of the electronic glitch trailblazers Oval. While not a total departure, the album is far more approachable than all these imposing bona fides might suggest. This is meticulous, introspective chamber-pop, unfurling a bit like Van Dyke Parks’ work with Brian Wilson. Drums bustle over an ambling quiet with thoughtful digital textures. By the time jaunty horns streak out of nowhere like sunbursts, across the final track, there’s a sense of having been entrusted with a deep and profound secret. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Gastr Del Sol, “Bauchredner”
Death Cab for Cutie: Something About Airplanes
It wasn’t until 2003’s Transatlanticism that Death Cab for Cutie became an indie rock pivot point for recovering emo kids. But in the decade before frontman Ben Gibbard transformed into a millennial icon of sad cardigans, he became known for something else: vivid but unintelligible lyrics, as heard on Death Cab’s proper debut, Something About Airplanes. Call it a rookie songwriting tendency (as Gibbard himself has), but for the Bellingham, Wash. group’s core audience, this mysterious evocation was part of their early appeal. In brooding music like this, the lyrics are ostensibly important; in actuality, it’s the feelings that matter most. When Gibbard sings about things like being drunk enough to drive you home in “Champagne From a Paper Cup,” bruises turning bluer in “Your Bruise,” or the scenes that unfold on rainy Sundays in “President of What?,” there’s no mistaking his contagious, self-pitying sulk.
It wasn’t just Gibbard’s lyrical approach that shifted after Something About Airplanes, though. This is the Death Cab album that serves as a gateway into drifting slowcore and explosive post-rock, with a forceful crunch of percussion giving the songs teeth. But when they manage a Smiths-style blend of sad lyrics and happy pop melodies, there’s also a bit of foreshadowing. Something About Airplanes was the album that launched a thousand emotional fits but, more importantly, it set the table for one of the biggest indie-rock crossovers of the 2000s. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Death Cab for Cutie, “President of What?”
Spoon: A Series of Sneaks
Looking back in a 2014 interview, Spoon frontman Britt Daniel said that A Series of Sneaks marked the band’s break with the electric guitar, a tool “too used, too simple, too alt-rock.” Here, in other words, marked the emergence of a band that still wanted to present as a front-facing rock trio while quietly stripping the thing for parts. Punky but cryptic, direct in execution but shadowed in intent, the songs hit like shrapnel, speeding fragments that hint at an unseen whole. Most are under three minutes long; several are under two; all (as per Daniel’s comment about the electric guitar) have the curious air of having been excavated before public release, leaving the listener to wander guardedly around negative space. It was a vision of indie-rock as noir, as dub, a glimmer of the ghosts the band would conjure in years to come. –Mike Powell
Listen: Spoon, “Metal Detektor”
Jay-Z: Vol. 2... Hard Knock Life
It’s called Vol. 2 but Jay-Z’s third LP is, more accurately, an album full of firsts. It was Jay’s first No. 1 album—buoyed by his first two Top 20 singles, “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” and “Can I Get A…”—and it sparked his streak of 14 consecutive Billboard-topping records. Vol. 2 also commenced Jay’s relationship with Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, who were still earning their stripes with tracks beamed back from several years in the future. Swizz’s menacing synth squeals under “Money, Cash, Hoes” sounded like nothing else at the time, and Irv Gotti’s hyper-syncopated minimalism on “Can I Get A...” inspired Jay to “flow futuristic,” adopting one of his most dextrous rhyme schemes just to keep up.
But Jay’s built his legend through his sui generis self-mythologizing, and it was “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)”—his first platinum single, and the primary reason Vol. 2 remains his highest-selling album—that solidified his superstar status while signaling his nascent business savvy. (To smooth the rights-clearance process for the Annie-sampling track, Jay lied to the song’s lyricist in a handwritten letter, claiming he’d loved the Broadway play as a child.) In 1998, hip-hop was in its earliest moments of conquering the pop mainstream and the corporate boardroom, and Jay was leading the charge. Reasonable Doubt may have been his origin story, but Vol. 2 was the debut of Jay-Z the rap icon. –Eric Harvey
Listen: Jay-Z, “Can I Get A...”
Plastikman: Consumed
Richie Hawtin first conceived of Plastikman as an outlet for the trippier aspects of his raves in Detroit’s abandoned industrial spaces. But after a few years of dropping acid and losing his shit in crumbling, strobe-lit rooms, the bright, giddy vibe of his early-’90s recordings was beginning to sour. Inspired by the vastness of the Canadian plains, the inky depths of Rothko’s paintings, and the “chambers of nothingness” he found in Anish Kapoor’s sculptures, Consumed slows techno’s pulse to a soporific crawl, drapes the DJ booth in a lead blanket, and swaps out the strobes for black lights and a blood-red glow. The trademark acid squelch of the TB-303 still gurgles away, but it has turned noxious and wormlike. A far cry from the big beat and electronica that were kicking off the United States’ proto-EDM revolution at the time, Plastikman’s paranoid minimalism is a thrillingly dour document of pre-millennium tension. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Plastikman, “Consumed”
DMX: It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot
DMX came in bold. In the video for his debut single, “Get at Me Dog,” he barked like a rabid pit bull onstage at the Tunnel, the legendary New York nightclub. The song, which included a 2Pac diss, anticipated It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, which was full of the same zealous storytelling, unglued theatrics, and inexorable nihilism. When the New Yorker rapped about materialism, it was just to skewer it, like on “Stop Being Greedy,” and he made deals with the literal devil on “Damien” without teetering into corny territory. Even the tender touch of the pseudo-slow jam “How’s It Going Down?” is marked with the dilemma of getting someone pregnant when she has a boyfriend. The classic “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” rages, “All I know is pain/All I feel is rain,” despite being known as a rugged party-starter.
Although DMX's life since 1998 has been marred by his own self-made tragedies, It’s Dark remains one of the most influential albums of the past 20 years because it brought then-up-and-comers Irv Gotti and Swizz Beatz into the spotlight, along with main producer Dame Grease. Their stamp—along with DMX’s—is still felt on hip-hop. –Claire Lobenfeld
Listen: DMX, “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem”
Sunny Day Real Estate: How It Feels to Be Something On
The best introduction to Sunny Day Real Estate’s third album is no introduction at all. Rather, get out your headphones and dip a toe into the rippling riff that buoys the opening track, “Pillars,” and get swept away by vocals that break like a wave when the chorus hits. Marvel as “Every Shining Time You Arrive” sublimates exhaustion and uncertainty into hope. Fall hard for the deliberately plucked guitars and thundering cymbals of “Guitar and Video Games,” dizzy from the exhilaration of a romance that flouts meaningless social norms. Consider that this suite of giddily transcendent, four-minute head trips is perfectly named.
There will be time, later, to read up on the mythos that surrounds Sunny Day Real Estate: their debut album Diary’s place of honor in the emo canon, their strange approach to the indie-rock publicity machine, the way frontman Jeremy Enigk’s post-Diary Christian rebirth influenced the devotional lyrics of How It Feels. All of those stories are fascinating. But the music of How It Feels to Be Something On has such emotional immediacy, interpreting these songs through the lens of the band’s history is like using Virginia Woolf’s Wikipedia page to decode To the Lighthouse. –Judy Berman
Listen: Sunny Day Real Estate, “Pillars”
Juvenile: 400 Degreez
The South wasn’t always the go-to place for the hottest new hip-hop. In the late ’90s, when lyrical complexity was held in higher regard, the New Orleans rapper Juvenile was seen as a punchline by those still longing for the golden age of New York hip-hop. (In the era of Puff Daddy and multimillion-dollar budgets, anything beyond the Hudson was considered an outlier.) Yet Juve’s first single, “Ha,” and its follow-up, the anthemic “Back That Azz Up,” helped catapult the then-unknown label Cash Money Records into the mainstream and introduced listeners to a blend of Southern rap beyond the psychedelic soul of OutKast. Once 400 Degreez dropped, Juvenile became a household name almost overnight, and its co-stars—including a then-teenage Lil Wayne—became legends in New Orleans and beyond. 400 Degreez added legitimacy to the city’s rap scene and opened the door for Wayne, Baby, and Mannie Fresh to also become stars. Nowadays, the South is considered the epicenter of mainstream rap. Who’s laughing now? –Marcus J. Moore
Listen: Juvenile, “Back That Azz Up”
Refused: The Shape of Punk to Come
The Shape of Punk to Come (A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts) is the most pretentious hardcore album ever made and thus demands a reassessment of “pretentious” as the genre’s dirtiest word. Dennis Lyxzén’s opening words are “I’ve got a bone to pick with capitalism/And a few to break,” and nothing could better summarize Refused’s capability to be physically devastating, politically righteous, and extremely goofy all at the same time. If these Swedes had set out to do no more than inspire sick rail grinds, DOOM adverts, and Paramore songs, their legacy would still be secure as a post-hardcore band on top of their game.
But The Shape of Punk to Come sets its sights far higher, and usually hits the mark, outsourcing its riffs from rap-metal and its ad-libs from professional wrestling. (What is their definitive song, “New Noise,” but Ric Flair fronting Rage Against the Machine?) Even the parts that sound terribly dated or naive—the wonky techno interludes, the awkward anarchist agitprop—are precious reminders of how wrong this could have gone. Capitalism did not crumble as a result of The Shape of Punk to Come; it couldn’t even prevent Refused from accepting Coachella’s filthy reunion lucre in 2012. But the point wasn’t to create a future in their own image: It was to prove that the shape of punk to come is anything you want it to be. –Ian Cohen
Listen: Refused, “Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull”
Royal Trux: Accelerator
Royal Trux were one of the few bands to make it out of the 1990s alt-rock boom/bust with their cred and mystique intact. Accelerator was their getaway car, the tricked-out hot rod that was paid for by their temporary benefactors at Virgin Records, but which delivered them back to their original home at Drag City. On their two albums for Virgin, 1995’s Thank You and 1997’s Sweet Sixteen, Royal Trux had the funds to fully realize their unconventional vision of a classic-rock record. Accelerator, by contrast, sounds like a classic-rock band trying to make a Royal Trux record—hi-fi boogie debased into lo-fi noise, capped by a soulful power-ballad finale dedicated to, um, Steven Seagal.
With more radio-friendly production, the album’s righteous, riffed-up jams like “I’m Ready” and “The Banana Question” could’ve conceivably landed Royal Trux a slot on the H.O.R.D.E. tour that year. But shot through Accelerator’s freaky filter, they come out sounding like mysterious alien transmissions delivered via corroded circuitry. The ’70s-era rock that Royal Trux channel on Accelerator was larger-than-life, its golden-godly power harnessed through the biggest, most expensive stereo systems. But Accelerator anticipated how we’d really listen to music in the 21st century: through a pair of malfunctioning earbuds that you just accidentally put through a wash cycle. –Stuart Berman
Listen: Royal Trux, “I’m Ready”
Sonic Youth: A Thousand Leaves
In 1995, the last year Lollapalooza stood for something alternative, Sonic Youth closed their main set with “The Diamond Sea,” the 20-minute capper of their ninth album, Washing Machine. It was a fitting funeral march for the counterculture they’d helped create. Three years passed, an eternity in Sonic Youth’s album release schedule, before they stepped into the pre-millennium unknown with A Thousand Leaves. It’s carefully paced and strangely tuned, an album that spins slowly somewhere between music for an art major’s weed sesh and a no wave transcendentalist manifesto. The lyrical turns of Moore’s “Wildflower Soul” and Ranaldo’s “Hoarfrost” conjure the image of Thoreau wearing Ray-Bans at CBGB, and Gordon’s “Female Mechanic Now on Duty” pulls the skin off a glammy Bowie song and wears it with a sadistic glee. It’s what you expect from a 10th Sonic Youth album: reflexive, mature, difficult, and at times indulgent. Removed from its lineage, however, it contains some of the band’s greatest guitar work and most graceful, everlasting songs. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: Sonic Youth, “Wildflower Soul”
Mercury Rev: Deserter’s Songs
The alt-rock boom made some weirdos rich and left a lot more like Mercury Rev completely devastated. After 1995’s See You on the Other Side tanked, the band was left in disarray: Singer-guitarist Jonathan Donahue was broke, drinking himself into a stupor and trying to reconcile with guitarist/vocalist Grasshopper, who had taken refuge in a monastery. About the only things he had left were the encouragement of Chemical Brothers, an old song called “Goddess on a Hiway” that he wrote while playing with the Flaming Lips, and the production services of former bassist Dave Fridmann, who was simultaneously working on the Lips’ The Soft Bulletin. But in 1997, that kind of credibility could be leveraged for a Richard Branson cash infusion, and Deserter’s Songs took care of the rest, a stunning reinvention for a band that didn’t have much of a choice.
A private psychedelic reel set to 35mm film, Deserter’s Songs basically created an entire subgenre of fractured fairy tales. While 1998 was rife with slavish Pet Sounds worship, Donahue was the rare old soul who dared to find a spiritual connection with Brian Wilson, rather than a sonic one. No amount of vocal fairy dust could conceal the deep, druggy hurt and isolation that inspired his retreat into Talespinners for Children and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, nor the yearning for escape embedded into the deceptively joyous “Hudson Line” and “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp.” The record is a timeless cry for help from a man who also just wasn’t made for these times. –Ian Cohen
Listen: Mercury Rev, “Hudson Line”
Big Pun: Capital Punishment
There was a palpable buzz surrounding Big Punisher in 1997. A Bronx native known for tongue-twisting flows, he was an almost mythical MC who could woo the ladies and vanquish battle-rappers in equal measure. Two years earlier, Pun spit the best verse on Fat Joe’s “Watch Out.” After that, off the strength of his singles “I’m Not a Player” and “Twinz (Deep Cover ’98),” his debut album did not disappoint.
Featuring everyone from Wyclef and Noreaga to Black Thought and Busta Rhymes, Capital Punishment stands as a landmark project and a lyrical tour de force full of menacing street rhymes, breezy tropical textures, and shit-talking posse cuts. More than anything, though, it proved that Big Pun was well worth the hype and that his brand of lyricism could earn platinum plaques: Pun was the first Latino solo rapper to sell a million-plus albums. The rapper died of a heart attack just two years later, right before the release of his sophomore LP, Yeeeah Baby! But for a brief period in time, he was one of the world’s best MCs, and Capital Punishment was his brightest moment. –Marcus J. Moore
Listen: Big Pun, “I’m Not a Player”
Hole: Celebrity Skin
Courtney Love, 1998: To half the rock world, she’s the most hated woman alive, the succubus who destroyed Kurt Cobain to boost her career. To the other half, she’s the hero who shattered the grunge glass ceiling with Hole’s landmark Live Through This but left them waiting four years for a follow-up while she traipsed off to be a movie star. Has an artist ever had so much to prove with their next album?
“Oh, make me over/I’m all I want to be/A walking study/In demonology,” Love sneers in the opening title track, staring down her haters with middle fingers raised defiantly. (Truly, “Celebrity Skin” was the “Look What You Made Me Do” of its day.) What follows are 12 tracks of glittery, bloody catharsis, razor-sharp meditations on the seedy underbelly of Hollywood that seethe with rage and unfathomable grief. The album would go on to sell over a million copies, be nominated for three Grammys, and place at number 14 on the 1998 Pazz & Jop music critics’ poll (one spot higher than In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). Hole imploded the following year, but the mythic figure of Courtney Love—goddess, villain, role model, cautionary tale—would only continue to grow. –Amy Phillips
Listen: Hole, “Celebrity Skin”
Fugazi: End Hits
Sure, Fugazi probably intended a healthy note of sarcasm in their fifth album title—nothing the D.C. post-hardcore outfit recorded could reasonably be called a “hit,” given their holistic disdain for the music industry machine—but that didn’t stop them from loading up End Hits with some of their most accessible songs. Without sacrificing any of the muscle of their first four LPs, Fugazi opened up new pores in their austere, genre-hopping rock, allowing enough space for a few numbers that might even be called catchy. Songs like “Five Corporations” prioritized vocal melody in a way Fugazi previously hadn’t really bothered with, while “Recap Modotti” and “Arpeggiator” spun basslines that spoke to the way people usually dance when they’re not butting heads in the mosh pit. A new depth in the album’s production let each song reverberate with fresh heat, and while there’s plenty of Ian Mackaye’s acerbic wit to be found here, End Hits struck a tone that was surprisingly inviting—for Fugazi, at least. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Fugazi, “Five Corporations”
Sparklehorse: Good Morning Spider
The duality of Mark Linkous’ Southern Thing is plainest on “Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man,” which comes midway through the rural Virginian’s second LP as Sparklehorse. The first half of the track sounds like it’s emanating from a shitty old transistor radio before fading midway into a CD-clear version of the same song. Good Morning Spider came a decade after Linkous had flamed out of the mainstream record business (as guitarist for never-was, late-’80s power poppers Dancing Hoods), and about a year after he died for a few minutes, of complications from a drug overdose, while touring Europe with Radiohead for OK Computer.
Spider tracks “Pig,” “Sick of Goodbyes,” and “Ghost of His Smile” proved that Linkous had mastered the moment’s post-alternative rock trends, but the album proved he was just as comfortable as an outsider folk artist, cocooning his voice in lo-fi effects and lapsing into creaky lullabies, as on “St. Mary” and “Sunshine.” During rock’s lengthy, post-grunge identity crisis, Linkous was one of the few weirdos who could integrate two distinct personas into a single, captivating statement. –Eric Harvey
Listen: Sparklehorse, “Pig”
Autechre: LP5
By the late 1990s, popular attitudes toward technology were ambivalent, to say the least. “The Internet Will Change Everything!” brayed the headlines, but the same papers also warned, “The Y2K Bug Will Destroy Modern Life as We Know It!”(One of those things came true and, 20 years later, the latter does seem rather appealing.) Nothing spoke to that twin sense of promise and threat quite like the music of Autechre, who by their fifth album sounded less like an electronic duo than a bona fide artificial intelligence that had taken root in the circuitry of their machines. On LP5, the sleek, wistful electro of the English duo’s early releases has turned into a glitch-riddled jitter; beats grounded in techno and hip-hop dissolve into dizzying chains of fractals, and everything is bathed in an eerie, high-tech sheen. Lending to the sense that a computer virus had infected their systems, meanwhile, many tracks end with the tempo slowing unexpectedly and the beats lurching to a stop, like a wistful Roy Batty bowing his head and powering down in the rain. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Autechre, “Vose In”
Mark Hollis: Mark Hollis
Post-rock was one of the 1990s’ most fruitful detours, and no one exemplified the genre’s restlessness better than the UK’s Talk Talk. Originally a synth-pop group, the band veered into uncharted waters on 1988’s Spirit of Eden, an improvised record of chamber psychedelia so outré that their record company sued them over it. Following the group’s final document, 1991’s even more adventurous Laughing Stock, frontman Mark Hollis disappeared into the studio for seven years and returned with an album of spare, mostly acoustic songs so quiet that the creaking of his chair is occasionally audible. Inspired by Can’s shape-shifting textures and Morton Feldman’s use of empty space, it is a vision of music where “every little note matters.” Woodwinds twist in the air like wisps of smoke; piano chords fall as softly as afternoon light on burnished floorboards. At the center of it all is Hollis’ gorgeous, fragile voice, as ephemeral as a sigh. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Mark Hollis, “Watershed”
Beastie Boys: Hello Nasty
None of the Beastie Boys’ ’90s albums were exactly trim, but Hello Nasty was sprawling even by their standards: a 22-song, 67-minute grab bag that subbed out the periodic punk outbursts of its predecessors with mellower, headier studio experiments. At its core, the album is a revisionist love letter to ’80s hip-hop, built from repurposed trappings of that era—808s, disco breaks, beatboxing, analogue synthesizers, Kool Moe Dee and Kurtis Blow samples, and scratches (courtesy of Mixmaster Mike, a hero of the late-’90s turntablism movement). But its true character lies in its tangents and outliers—the leisurely electronic pastiches, tipsy dub tracks, and earnest ballads that break up all the instant-gratification rap songs.
Especially in its second half, an odd rhythm develops in the contrast between the album’s jolting electro-funk and its melancholy confessionals. At one point, Hello Nasty drifts off with the blissfully Brazilian-tinged acoustic lament “I Don’t Know,” only to snap back to attention with the trunk-rattler “The Negotiation Limerick File.” That disjointed nature is what makes the album feel, even more so than the skateboarder’s paradise of Check Your Head and Ill Communication, like a mixtape crafted specifically for fans curious about the full range of the band’s tastes. The Beastie Boys made more immediate albums, but none with such musical and emotional range. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen: Beastie Boys, “The Negotiation Limerick File”
Madonna: Ray of Light
At the end of “Drowned World/Substitute for Love,” the meditative opening track of Ray of Light, Madonna utters some of the most powerful words a woman can declare: “I’ve changed my mind.” She had spent the early ’90s pushing the envelope on sexual taboos before cooling off with the tasteful R&B album Bedtime Stories, returning four years later as a new mother on the brink of 40, spiritual and self-actualized. It was one of the most shocking things Madonna could have done.
Though Ray of Light took pop soul-searching to new heights, the album’s palette of understated techno and electronica furthered Madonna’s longtime M.O.: From the start of her career, she had been attuned to the undercurrents of club music, finding ways to incorporate trending subgenres into mainstream pop (for better or worse). With the help of under-the-radar electronic producer William Orbit, Madonna steered clear of new age clichés (with the exception of the Sanskrit yoga chants on “Shanti/Ashtangi”) and made a record that still sounds stylish and forward-thinking. The title track wasn’t just one of Madonna’s best singles to date, but also a hedonistic cheat-sheet for clean-living, self-helping ravers to come. As for the darker end of introspection, Madonna offered up a handful of striking songs about the complicated nature of motherhood in “Frozen” and “Nothing Really Matters.” She never lets listeners forget that she’s seen it all, but it doesn’t mean she still can’t be stunned and humbled by life itself. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Madonna, “Nothing Really Matters”
Tortoise: TNT
Tortoise may not have chosen the term “post-rock” but they embodied it fully on their third album. The rhythm-section workouts of the group’s 1994 self-titled debut and studio wizardry of 1996’s follow-up, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, established them as masters of dynamics—but their next full-length, TNT, resolutely refused to explode. It sounded expansive, organic, and unusually subtle, even by Tortoise standards.
Their first album with guitarist Jeff Parker as a full-time member, TNT found the group delving into Chicago’s rich avant-garde jazz tradition, adding horns and strings to another dubwise studio odyssey through spaghetti-western twang, krautrock chug, and minimalist vibraphone reveries. (OK, some dated drum-and-bass pitter-pattering, too.) They’d retreat back toward a tighter, more rock-minded approach on 2001’s Standards, but jazz has been a familiar ingredient of Tortoise’s eclectic palette ever since TNT. Contemplative rather than combustible, defying expectations all the while, TNT demonstrates how Tortoise’s mystique has endured for more than two decades. They sweat the small stuff so we can get lost in it. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Tortoise, “TNT”
Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Lucinda Williams’ critical and commercial breakthrough, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, was a hard-fought victory. Just her fifth album in a career already spanning two decades, Williams spent the better part of four years chasing down Car Wheels’ sound, shelving entire sessions, sundering decade-long musical partnerships, and leaving her label, Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, in the dust. Co-producer and collaborator Steve Earle described the process as “the least amount of fun I’ve had working on a record,” but Williams held fast to her vision, and her hybrid of raw folk, scuffed-boot country, bottleneck blues, and barroom rock helped solidify what would come to be called “Americana.” But rather than settle in as mere reverence to old musical forms, Car Wheels remains vital thanks to Williams’ gift for exacting, visceral lyrics, in which she conveys deep heartbreak and steely resolve with her frayed twang. –Andy Beta
Listen: Lucinda Williams, “Drunken Angel”
Gang Starr: Moment of Truth
From 1989 to 1994, Gang Starr earned a reputation as one of hip-hop’s preeminent duos. Albums like 1991’s Step Into the Arena, 1992’s Daily Operation, and 1994’s Hard to Earn were cornerstones of rap’s critical ascent. Guru, a straight-talking MC from Boston, was known for his monotone flow, while DJ Premier, from Houston, quickly became a go-to producer for other rappers after his showing with Gang Starr;Premier’s mix of gritty drum loops and rapid scratches fit the frowning aesthetic of hip-hop at the time.
But by the mid-’90s, the future of Gang Starr was in jeopardy, as Guru faced serious jail time after he was arrested for gun possession at a New York airport. They channeled that uncertainty into Moment of Truth—starting with the cover, in which Guru and Premier stand before a judge in a mock sentencing, and then on the song “JFK 2 LAX,” in which the usually reserved Guru boils over in frustration: “Things are fucked up the way my future’s looking/But I’m too fly, I’mma change this scenario.” Moment of Truth is an all-in effort that found the duo at their creative apex. Not only did Guru and Premier step up their respective talents, the album also featured standout verses from rappers Inspectah Deck, Freddie Foxxx, G-Dep, and Scarface. For a group teetering on the edge, Moment of Truth is Gang Starr’s shining moment. –Marcus J. Moore
Listen: Gang Starr, “JFK 2 LAX”
Pulp: This Is Hardcore
Several events can be pinpointed as the moment Britpop died: the release of Blur’s discordant 1997 self-titled album, the debut of the Spice Girls, that feeling that sunk in when you hit minute three of Oasis’ “All Around the World” and realized, “Fuck me, there’s still six minutes of this to go.” But there’s no disputing that This Is Hardcore was the tombstone dropped onto the grave: the heavy, dark-grey monolith that brought resounding finality to it all. Pulp were the outsiders who saw themselves as bystanders to the Britpop party, but still managed to get sucked up in the cocaine supernova; This Is Hardcore was Jarvis Cocker’s distress signal sent from behind the velvet rope at 4 a.m., when the club lights flip on and expose all the cigarette smoke and desperation hanging in the room. It’s the dramatic, string-swept soundtrack of drug-induced panic attacks (“The Fear”), sexual depravity (the title track), and the stone-cold sober realization that you’re not getting any younger (“Help the Aged”). Here, Pulp fantasize about their own funeral, barely making it out alive. –Stuart Berman
Listen: Pulp, “Help the Aged”
Beck: Mutations
When Beck released Mutations, it sounded almost like a resignation, the work of a radical surrendering his edge for a home on the imagined range. Once a junkyard cutup who built visions of the future from the trash of the past, he now presented as reflective and forlorn, a divorcé with an empty drink; once a collage artist, he now walked a straight line. And where Mellow Gold and Odelay had derived their humor from fantasizing about how shitty things could get (“Loser”), Mutations wasn’t funny at all. Call it the fatigue of being cool, call it life catching up. Here Beck offered an oblique, delicately constructed world of cold brains, dead melodies, lazy flies and canceled checks, of crisp acoustic guitars and starry synth blips, folding in folk and blues not as jokes about authenticity but vestiges of a world in decay. Mutations is a world not actively ruined so much as left to crumble in its own beautiful time. –Mike Powell
Listen: Beck, “Canceled Check”
Black Star: Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star
In the wake of the death of Tupac and Biggie, Mos Def and Talib Kweli could sense a seismic shift about to happen, and Puff Daddy’s ascent only expedited it. So they took their shot at Rawkus Records to form the “best alliance in hip-hop,” as they called it, laying down “accurate assassin shit” while refusing to be interrupted. Their sermons urged the mainstream to listen to the underground, to the sounds of John Coltrane, to the words of Toni Morrison—to learn the life of Marcus Garvey, to whom the name Black Star pays homage.
Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star plays like a map of Brooklyn’s soul, undiluted by a major label: Violence wasn’t the answer and wealth was a wicked golem. Producer Hi-Tek filled the space with rocksteady bass never out of pocket and a snare crisp as an apple. Black Star followed in the mold of the Native Tongues Posse, especially Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. Mos and Talib were two complementary forces reckoning with life in New York. “It’s kind of dangerous to be an MC,” they sang on the hook of the indelible “Definition,” a survey of the vacuum of hip-hop just before the turn of the century. Puff wanted everyone to hear rap; Black Star wanted everyone to listen. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: Black Star, “Definition”
Silver Jews: American Water
American Water was the pinnacle of a certain strain of indie rock: smart but unpolished, grounded but opaque, the down-home sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the country side of the Rolling Stones executed by college boys raised on punk. There are some flubbed turns, some shaky tempos, solos that sputter midstream like wayward fireworks. There are portraits of men with duct-taped shoes and suspenders made of extension cords, of losers who look dumb for trying and sad because they still think they might win.
At the center of the band was David Berman, published poet and sometime lover of drugs, a sensitive man who bristled at the pretensions of sensitive men. His lines scanned like bumper stickers written by monks, catalogs of mundanities—the mirrored properties of ski-vest buttons, the tan lines of a ring finger—assembled with such care that they suddenly, in a flash, seemed holy. Then he was a writer who offered an image of glory as weakness, sadness as truth, of someone falling on their ass in slow motion and lifting their grin to the camera, knowing the lens might never turn on them again. –Mike Powell
Listen: Silver Jews, “People”
Belle and Sebastian: The Boy With the Arab Strap
Success can be disorienting when you’re a young indie-pop band with a small but global cult following. Endless travel makes home an abstract idea. The borders between waking life and dreams smudge. Suddenly, the iconic Sire Records boss Seymour Stein has flown across an ocean to [tell your keyboard player he looks like Johnny Marr](https://books.google.com/books?id=OeILCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA185&dq="belle+and+sebastian"+"seymour+stein"&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjfus2-6fPYAhWB6lMKHST7ASYQ6AEIODAD#v=onepage&q="belle and sebastian" "seymour stein"&f=false). This was life in the mid-’90s for Glasgow’s Belle and Sebastian, whose provocative brand of orchestral lullabies—weaving together frontman Stuart Murdoch’s religious ambivalence, low-key perversity, fixation on childhood, and novelistic lyrics—had unexpectedly drawn the attention of the mainstream music industry.
Their third album, The Boy With the Arab Strap, projected these preoccupations onto an expanded world. Its title track, partially inspired by Belle and Sebastian’s mouthy tourmates Arab Strap, documented a bus ride through London, a jaunty electric piano riff evoking wheels rolling over pavement, while “Chickfactor” is a New York lament straight out of The Velvet Underground. But there are blurrier, less grounded moments, too, like the fevered trumpet-and-violin climax of “Dirty Dream Number Two” and the doubts that cut through multi-instrumentalist Isobel Campbell’s sugared vocals on “Is It Wicked Not to Care?” And the Seymour we meet in the song that bears his name? He’s nothing but a symbol of the gulf between success and satisfaction. –Judy Berman
Listen: Belle and Sebastian, “Is It Wicked Not to Care?”
PJ Harvey: Is This Desire?
On 1995’s To Bring You My Love, PJ Harvey transformed from the scrappy blues-punk phenom heard on her first two records into an omnipotent goth-rock seductress, unleashing long snake moans and summoning monsoons. But on its follow-up, that humid, swampy, sexually charged atmosphere gave way to a trembling chill. True to its questioning title, Is This Desire? is an ambiguous, unsettled work that serves to deconstruct both Harvey’s sound and her persona, hard-wiring her blues roots to trip-hop beats, jagged electronics, and the sort of subliminal bass frequencies that sound right at home in today’s post-dubstep world. And in contrast to the first-person fantasies and frustrations cataloged on her previous records, Harvey sings mostly in the third person, parading a cast of tragic heroes that includes the prostitute who dreams of leaving transactional sex behind (“Angelene”) and the housebound recluse whose loveless anguish is rendered in strobe-lit, electro-shocked clamor (“Joy”). Is This Desire? is the crucial transitional record that liberated Harvey from the prospect of being typecast as the ravenous diva, and every guise she’s assumed since—from the chamber-pop shrieker of White Chalk to the freak-folk pixie of Let England Shake—was made possible by it. –Stuart Berman
Listen: PJ Harvey, “Joy”
Boredoms: Super Ae
Boredoms had a weird ’90s. They started out like the Japanese cousins of the Butthole Surfers, mixing punk shock theater with an aggro spin on classic rock. One album might be a series of crunchy riffs and incomprehensible, high-pitched shrieking; the next could be an hour-long noise piece. But by the mid-’90s, the Osaka group’s prankster approach took on focus and a spiritual dimension. The absurd gestures were still present, but now they were fused with psychedelic rock of rare and raw power. Krautrock became a deeper inspiration; the repetition of Can and Neu! were infused with the unwashed and wooly caveman jams of the original Amon Düül.
All of the above came together in sublime fashion on Super Ae, their single most explosive blast of rock’n’roll damage. Guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto finds the perfect tone for each track, from the rain-song shimmer of “Super Going” to the impossibly glorious Tony Iommi half-time stomp of “Super Are.” Yoshimi P-We leads a trio of drummers whose beats range from motorik-tight to free-jazz wild. And Boredoms mastermind Yamantaka Eye is the master of ceremonies, chanting and yelling and crooning hymns to the sun while applying all manner of treatments and tape edits. The result: a glorious and tragically brief glimpse into one possible rock future. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Boredoms, “Super Are”
Air: Moon Safari
“French culture and rock do not go well together,” Air’s Nicolas Godin once said. “It’s like English wine.” Knowing their limitations, Godin and his space-pop partner Jean-Benoît Dunckel bypassed the raw angst of rock entirely on their debut album, Moon Safari. Instead, the Versailles duo offered a supremely luxe antidote to the post-grunge and nü-metal of 1998, a record steeped in sentimental ’60s piffle, loungey jazz, and the easiest of easy listening. It was defiantly uncool music that still set new standards for cool.
Though Moon Safari came out in an era defined by irony, and some critics of the time had a hard time translating Air’s level of seriousness through their accents, listening to the album now is nothing but a sincere experience. “Sexy Boy” is a wistful teenage daydream, while the seven-minute opener “La Femme d’Argent” is a startling salvo—a time-warp through prog and funk concocted by a couple of music nerds with a knack for grand, symphonic statements. At this point, given the triumph of “chill” playlists, rampant eclecticism, and a renewed interest in the forgotten vinyl of yesteryear—not to mention rock’s continuing obsolescence—Moon Safari sounds like a harbinger, a skeleton key to all of our retro-futuristic dreams. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Air, “Sexy Boy”
Massive Attack: Mezzanine
Where Blue Lines and Protection set trip-hop’s course burrowing inward, spiraling through skunk-infused paranoia, Mezzanine looked outward. The Bristol icons Massive Attack sound as gloomy as ever here, but there’s a newfound clarity to their dirge-like beats and smoky atmospheres. The haze lifts with the very first track, “Angel,” in which metal guitars slice like knives, and on “Teardrop,” in which Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and a harpsichord sparkle in sunlit relief against the shuffling dub backdrop. Still, the band hasn’t cut ties with their subterranean roots; reggae’s influence runs deep on songs like “Man Next Door.”
But where trip-hop had always hovered hesitantly between the underground and the spotlight, with Mezzanine, Massive Attack push the genre boldly onto the pop stage—if not on the level of hooks and choruses, then in terms of production qualities. In places, their reinvention recalls that of the Cure, who similarly went from shadow dwellers to spotlight-grabbers without relinquishing their essentially saturnine character. Mezzanine is as bleak as ever, it’s just rendered in sparkling HD. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Massive Attack, “Teardrop”
Cat Power: Moon Pix
Lots of sad music tackles sadness as a static emotion, a big ball of mope to be dragged around. Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), a master bummer interpreter, sees the little sparks within the downsides of life, the frayed edges where sadness begins to erode as it meets reality. Her fourth album, Moon Pix, has a vibe of heavy burden, centered around Marshall’s casually devastating voice—a deep and bluesy sound that seeps out of her with seemingly no effort. “If drinking does not kill me/Then I do not know what will,” she sings on “Moonshiner,” a standard that she turns into an anti-anthem—a peek at her diary, presented plain, as she passes its burden onward.
Marshall’s problems with drinking lasted years after this record, as she became a huge artist who struggled to deal with being onstage and having a devoted audience. It’s very little surprise that she reached so many people; there are few musicians able to make rock songs feel like spirituals, and those who do are usually bearded and say stuff like “heritage” a lot. Cat Power used a drum machine. This is as powerful as indie gets, bar none. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Cat Power, “Moonshiner”
Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children
Though Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison had been putting out home-recorded tapes for years, at the dawn of 1998, the Scottish duo was still little more than a rumor. With just one legit release to their name—a 1996 12'' of skeletal grooves on the under-the-radar label Skam—they were known mainly to denizens of Hyperreal’s hyper-nerdy IDM listserv. But with Music Has the Right to Children, the Scots revealed themselves to the world at large, their synesthetic and psychedelic vision fully formed. Titles like “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” and “Triangles & Rhombuses” are a helpful reminder that no, your brain isn’t playing tricks on you: Their sui-generis downbeat grooves are swimming with colors and shapes. Aquamarine keys swirl over scratchy hip-hop and electro beats, and time-stretched vocal samples conjure a strange mix of childlike innocence and grown-up dread. Released in the UK by the groundbreaking Warp label, the record got a leg up in the U.S. when indie label Matador licensed it—part of a late-’90s signing spree that introduced stateside audiences to a wealth of then-obscure European electronica, including Pole and Burger/Ink, and turning more than a few Pavement and Yo La Tengo fans into ravers overnight. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Boards of Canada, “Turquoise Hexagon Sun”
Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
It’s hard, given everything, to write about God by name without coming off like an evangelist; harder still to fold God into a surrealistic panoply of first love, familial abuse, dead friends, World War II, dying twins, weird sex, and mutant boys dancing at the end of the world. Jeff Mangum’s God couldn’t be confined to any one dogma. The world he renders on Neutral Milk Hotel’s second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, is too rich and too paradoxical to be taken as scripture, and yet it radiates with the childlike faith that love is real and hope is real and people are good, if given the chance. You can call that God, if you like.
Woven through with guitar and banjo and fuzz bass and singing saw, the instrumentation on Aeroplane serves mainly as a playing ground for Mangum’s tremendous yawp, a voice so big it overdrives his microphones even on acoustic songs like “Two-Headed Boy” and “Oh Comely”—a voice that sounds like it’s coming not from his mouth but from the stump of his neck after someone’s hacked off his head. Really, there’s no other way to sing about ghosts and cum and communists than with enough conviction to unshelve a military bunker, and Mangum does; he means it. Agnostic to time, space, and causality, Aeroplane ripples back to Nazi-occupied Europe (in the horn-propelled “Holland, 1945”) and forward to the end of time (in “Two-Headed Boy”), both of which feel closer to us, in 2018, than they ought to. There’s so much death in this album, but Mangum’s agnostic to that, too. You won’t find him mourning here. He’s too busy singing out his love: for his parents, his friends, for Anne Frank and other genocide victims, for God and Jesus Christ, for you. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Neutral Milk Hotel, “Two-Headed Boy”
Elliott Smith: XO
Elliott Smith had only begun to break our hearts. With his fourth studio album, the 29-year-old singer/songwriter embraced the trimmings of his new major-label budget, layering his mournful voice in cotton harmonies and honing in with aching, ASMR-worthy attention on every guitar-string flick. And his gift for perfect, tidal pop melodies—and the core empathy that radiated from his every word—endured.
XO is a strange, nostalgic album that belies Smith’s gentleness, not just in the studio but as he moved through the world—a man content to listen, studying the flashy characters who refracted his own inner turmoil. How else to explain the piano-pecked “Waltz #2,” in which he sighs his unrealized love with the bittersweet frailty of a discarded tintype, or his country-inflected guitar ditty “Independence Day” about “future butterflies,” aka the souls who flitted by with the levity he’d lost? Of all the grim characters he appraises on XO, lining them up like shots at a bar, he is always the one most outside the light. Hearing him is still difficult and beautiful; it is a soul squaring off against the unforgiving strictures of the world. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Elliott Smith, “Waltz #2”
Lauryn Hill: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
By the time she turned 23, on May 26, 1998, the artist now known as Ms. Lauryn Hill had co-starred opposite Whoopi Goldberg, briefly attended Columbia University, released a classic album with the Fugees, founded a charity, and given birth to her first child by Bob Marley’s son, Rohan. Later that year, she released an album so bold and mature that it could only have come from a young musician who’d already collected a lifetime’s worth of experiences.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was, famously, the result of Hill’s professional and romantic rift with her Fugees bandmate Wyclef Jean. More importantly, it was the manifesto of a brilliant young woman who’d embraced faith, love, and motherhood while growing disillusioned with the materialistic hip-hop mainstream and the men who controlled it. In this fragmented autobiography, Hill imparts her hard-won wisdom about karma, patience, and self-respect. “Every Ghetto, Every City” lingers on the sensory details of her New Jersey childhood. On “To Zion,” she stretches her voice heavenward in a gospel-style celebration of her infant son. “How you gonna win when you ain’t right within?” she chants in “Doo Wop (That Thing),” the No. 1 hit that was ubiquitous during the summer of 1998. The song was Hill’s ultimate statement—a wickedly catchy sermon against superficiality and hypocrisy in Hill’s community.
The music of Miseducation is equally ambitious, eschewing computers and compression in favor of analog instruments and the imperfections that come with them. By recruiting singular guests like Carlos Santana, Mary J. Blige, and D’Angelo, Hill aligned herself with some of music’s most timeless innovators. In sampling Bob Marley, José Feliciano, Wu-Tang, and the Doors, she synthesized each artist’s contributions into a diverse, genre-agnostic masterpiece that earned its every dig at uninspired rappers. Hill has said that she aimed to write songs with “the integrity of reggae and the knock of hip-hop and the instrumentation of classic soul.” Her fusion of those traditions and more on Miseducation remade the African-American pop canon in Hill’s own image. –Judy Berman
Listen: Lauryn Hill, “Doo Wop (That Thing)”
OutKast: Aquemini
Three years and one great album after they were booed at the 1995 Source Awards, OutKast still held a grudge against the rap establishment. On the last song of Aquemini, the scorching, Funkadelic-flavored “Chonkyfire,” they finally squashed it. As the track melts away, they hit play on the entirety of their Best New Artist acceptance speech, on which a 20-year-old André Benjamin claimed he was tired of “them closed-minded folks” and asserted that “the South got somethin’ to say.”
If the previous 71 minutes of Aquemini had proven anything, it was that Dre and Big Boi had plenty to say to closed-minded rap purists. Two years earlier, they fretted about their new fame leaving them floating face down in the mainstream, but with Aquemini, that question turned moot: They put Atlanta on the map while hovering far above the noise. Aquemini was not only the best album released in 1998, it was also Southern rap’s The Chronic and Are You Experienced?, a rap album full of live funk that established new lanes for “real”-ness and psychedelia. The same year that Jay-Z hit the pop charts, New Orleans blew up, and Lauryn Hill’s R&B/rap mind-meld swept the Grammys, OutKast earned their crown—one of their own design.
Driven by Dre’s increasingly spaced-out spirituality—a cocktail of astrology, Rastafarianism, and Baduizm—and leveled by Big’s technical skill and knack for hooks, and as always supported by the duo’s Dungeon Family associates (including members of Goodie Mob) and the Organized Noize team of producer/instrumentalists, Aquemini doubled down on ATLiens’ groove-first extra-terrestrialisms in service of their own Southern-fried G-Funk. Needless to say, the first single from the album, “Rosa Parks,” was unprecedented in popular music, let alone rap: a brilliant flip of 1960s Civil Rights iconography into a back porch country hoedown (complete with harmonica solo) themed to OutKast’s dominance. The deep-cut “Liberation,” featuring Cee-Lo Green and Erykah Badu, was equally novel for a putative rap record—a brooding, nine-minute jazz-n-b meditation on black identity and struggle that dialogued directly with Badu’s nascent Soulquarian collective.
Eight years before Idlewild, OutKast wrote a feature-length screenplay to accompany Aquemini. Though a studio squashed the film idea, the album’s “Da Art of Storytellin’” diptych clearly demonstrates that the duo’s capacity to work in Southern hood realism and post-apocalyptic sci-fi modes. Then there’s the eternally great “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” on which the full gamut of the duo’s world-weariness and knack for rich detail power seven delirious minutes of blaxploitation reggae. At a time when rap storytelling primarily comprised coming-of-age stories that inevitably ended in wild success, Dre and Big carved out new narrative territory: both new fathers in their early twenties, they warned of the inevitable comedown of street life and recalled being too drunk to get out of the van at the club. It’s not hard to imagine a precocious, preteen Kendrick Lamar taking notes.
The late 1990s were an odd time for pop music, and 1998 might have been the weirdest of all. While styles and scenes rapidly mutated into new forms, digital technologies transformed adventurous sampling and genre recombination into the pop norm, not the exception. OutKast were the new kings of this fractured landscape, and Aquemini is their magnum opus, a minor miracle of creative synthesis. Perhaps most impressively, they pushed against the tides of gangsta rap without sounding like scolds, coming across like true iconoclasts probing the outer reaches of what the culture could withstand. No one has matched it since. –Eric Harvey
