The alternative 90s: A guide to the best albums

Like the Tibetan monks who create paintings out of sand and then throw them into the river, bands have a habit of unleashing their finest work and then imploding. It’s perverse, it’s wilful and it’s tremendously rock’n’roll. 

Fitting, then, that Ritual… was JA’s swansong, because it espouses those values in spades. The whole record, from blistering opener Stop through back-to-back epics Three Days and Then She Did to Classic Girl’s spectral coda, is one gigantic ‘fuck you’; a toxic brew of funk, jazz and metal held together by an extraordinary performance from vocalist and bandleader Perry Farrell. 

Loveless isn’t just an essential alternative rock album, it’s also one of the best albums of the 90s. It’s like an overwhelming out-of-body experience – transcendent beauty with a capital ‘trance’ – and its reinvention of sound, texture and mood in rock music sounds as radical now as it did in 1991. 

My Bloody Valentine spent two years in the studio perfecting the formula: a dizzying blend of roaring guitars and sensual vocals from Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher. Loveless is a classic that’s spawned many imitators but has no peer. And we’re still waiting for the follow-up. 

The Holy Bible was a watershed in the Manics’ career, an unusual interlude between their early-era glam punk and the expansive, anthemic sound they produced later. It’s a tense, claustrophobic exploration of the dark recesses of the soul, recalling the bleak grandeur of Joy Division. 

It’s impossible to assess this record without acknowledging its back story. Thematically, it bears witness to Richey James’s inner turmoil and instability; he disappeared six months after this record’s release. 4st 7lb is an unbearably honest appraisal of his condition, and its lyrics read like a self-penned epitaph.

On the sleeve, Polly Jean Harvey’s mouth pressed against glass. It’s a startling image, vulnerable and exposed on the other. It’s also emblematic of this album’s chief preoccupation: an exploration of the iconography of womanhood. It’s at turns tough and tender. The rest of the lady’s band provides stark and abrasive backing – strong enough to keep your attention – but it’s singer Harvey that’s mesmeric. Her voice shifts seamlessly from a soft lament on death ballad Plants and Rags (this album’s standout track) to a guttural roar on scorching single Sheela-Na-Gig. This is a vital, visceral debut from a truly intoxicating artist.

Anyone who tells you that Bossanova represented a dip in form after the highs of Doolittle and Surfer Rosa clearly couldn’t have been at Gloucester Leisure Centre in 1991, or at last year’s glorious comeback gigs at Alexandra Palace, when a fevered throng saw the Pixies tear the roof off with renditions of this album’s opening tracks: Cecilia Ann, Velouria and the larynx-shredding Rock Music. Both occasions, 14 years apart, were almost religious experiences. So hear this, naysayers: the Pixies’ fourth album expands the band’s guitar onslaught to almost Wagnerian proportions, and it’s a sci-fi surf-pop masterpiece.

The early 90s felt like a comedown after the euphoric highs of the Second Summer of Love, but Primal Scream refused to stop partying. At a time when many inferior British bands were claiming that there had always been a dance element to their music, the PS created the most potent and influential crossover album of them all, filled with cult classics like Loaded and Higher Than The Sun. Collaborators included producers Andy Weatherall and Hugo Nicholson, and ambient dubsters The Orb. They can take a lot of credit for Screamadelica’s genre-spanning sound, which takes in soul, gospel, house and cavernous, wasted dub.

This thrilling debut from one of the defining rock bands of the 90s sounds like a blueprint for the rest of their career. All the elements of their sound are here: epic, progressive song structures, layer upon dense layer of showy guitars, a solid but swinging rhythm section, and of course Billy Corgan’s angst-ridden confessional lyrics and emotive delivery. Gish is dark, dramatic, and its moods are ever changing, from the slippery psychedelic riffs of rockers like I Am One and Siva to the album’s more tender moments with the chiming intricacies of Rhinoceros and the spidery folk strum of Crush. 

As the frontman of quintessential alternative pioneers Hüsker Dü, Bob Mould cut one of the most revered and idiosyncratic figures of the 80s. Following a couple of low-key solo releases, he formed Sugar with bassist David Barbe and ex-Zulus drummer Travis. This, their 1992 debut, is arguably the most complete record of Mould’s career, and received critical acclaim and commercial success in equal measure. A string of beautifully crafted, addictive melodies ride giant waves of trebly guitar; the whole thing sounds like a choir of angry bees in formation. It seems churlish to pick highlights, but try If I Can’t Change Your Mind and the relentless A Good Idea.

It’s often said that what really made The Beatles exceptional was the density of songwriting talent within the group. Most bands would be happy with a Harrison (and some with a Starr); factoring Lennon and McCartney into the mix seems like cheating. 

The same accusation could be levelled at Grand Prix-era Teenage Fanclub, with an album that sees Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley throwing tunes like killer punches in a three-way playground scrap for pop supremacy. Blake’s Mellow Doubt, Love’s Sparky’s Dream and McGinley’s About You are radiant career highs. 

Tool took three years to turn in this 77-minute follow-up to 1993’s incendiary Undertow, and it’s a heavyweight album in every sense. In many ways Aenima is a textbook alternative rock record, taking a high-concept, avant-garde sensibility inherited from punk and marrying it to metal’s fury and jaw-dropping technical prowess. Low on hollow posturing and high on intellect, it’s a considered package: musically, in progressive stylings borrowed from Rush and King Crimson; lyrically, in a willingness to push thematic envelopes beyond usual rock fodder, to include subjects like philosophy, evolution, genetics and metaphysics.