10 Best 1990s Alt-Rock Albums You Need To Hear
The incredible, indefinable albums of the 1990s.
The 1990s are well known for spawning many incredible genres of music. Whether it was the Seattle sound and Grunge craze that swept the world, or the Oasis vs. Blur Britpop debate that ran rife in the UK, we could spend ages talking about all the scenes that started up in the decade. However, it’s the places in which the outcasts went that really made magic.
Many of the greatest musical treasures of the 1990s come in the form of the oddities. The albums so strange that we had to invent a new genre of music to fit them in. They were rock - that much was indisputable - however the alt bands of the '90s were so indefinable that the only thing that linked them together was their differences.
'90s alt-rock was full of unusual bands who wrote music so audaciously good or catchy that they catapulted into success. If the 1990s were a time where good music could not stay ignored for long, the albums on this list wriggled out with their weirdness and into public consciousness. Some of these are loosely metal, rock, grunge or punk, but they’re so uniquely themselves...
10. Jane's Addiction - Ritual De Lo Habitual (1990)
Breaking out of a Los Angeles music scene full of cheese and spandex were Jane's Addiction: a sexy four-piece showing the darker, drug-soaked, exotic underbelly of the city. Whether it was lead singer Perry Farrell’s strange prepubescent voice or the sexy topless love making Dave Navarro would commit upon his guitar, the band posted a psychedelic, gypsy-esque, funk deviation from the mainstream.
Ritual De Lo Habitual was their second and last album before splitting up (for the first time). It was the product of a band fascinated by Santería, and carving out their own unique musical vision. Most of all, the album comes from a place of drug misuse and a battle with inner demons. The fact that the album was pulled off is miraculous and the fact that it doesn’t fall apart at the seams, even more so.
The record is rocking, groovy and loose, it kicked off the phenomenon of 1990s alternative rock by proving that you could be whatever you wanted to as long as you wrote from the soul. It was ambitious and it had every right to be.