10 Best 1990s Alt-Rock Albums You Need To Hear

2. Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness (1995)

Potentially the greatest double album of all time (Sorry, Pink Floyd), Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is 90s alt rock poetry. If the band’s on this list show the strangeness of human personality across the decade, The Smashing Pumpkins were aliens transported from out of this world.

With enormous scope and range, Mellon Collie transcends the breadth of emotion, experience and time. It’s grand, expansive, delicate and rioting: it’s a record for the youth of the 1990s and it’s everything they needed from music. The band took from their intimate psychedelia of 1991's Gish and incredible prog, pop-rock of 1993's Siamese Dream and escalated it to the nth degree.

The four-piece team of frontman and guitarist Billy Corgan, bassist D'arcy Wretzky, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin is like a misfit all-star best of alternative rock. Each is a dream of creativity.

It’s heartbreaking twilight, spaced out intimacy and an aggressive demand for more. Albums like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness live on in spirit rather than quality; when nobody understands you, this record will be there.