10 Most Underrated 90s Indie Bands You Need To Listen To

10. The Loud Family

The late Scott Miller is likely the unsung rock musician of his generation. (In 1996, famed artist and occasional collaborator Aimee Mann even called him “the best songwriter out there.”)

Throughout the 1980s, he led Game Theory, a superb jangle pop group that exuded tunefully artsy instrumentation, charmingly unassuming singing, and deceptively clever and sardonic lyricism. As Rolling Stone writer J.D. Considine once noted, the band “never garnered more than a cult following through its six-album run” in part because Miller’s compositions sounded “like Thomas Pynchon writing for Big Star.”

That’s a fair assessment, and while their final two LPs—1987’s Lolita Nation and 1988’s Two Steps from the Middle Ages—are certainly stellar sequences, it’s Loud Family’s debut disc (1993’s Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things) that ranks as Miller’s greatest (and thus, most overlooked) collection.

The psychedelically quirky and poetic He Do The Police in Different Voices is a clear standout, as are the baroquely guitar-driven Jimmy Still Comes Around and the downtrodden ballad Some Grand Vision Of Motives And Irony. That said, it’s Last Honest Face that ranks not only as the album’s top track, but as one of the best rock songs of all time.