10 Best Rock Albums That Everyone Forgets About

As Pearl Jam's star started to rise more and more, it almost seemed like Eddie Vedder didn't even want to be famous. From appearing disaffected in interviews to outright refusing to make music videos, the promotional rollout for every corresponding Pearl Jam outing started to get nuttier and nuttier as time went on. Even when albums like Vitalogy left us with weird songs to talk about, No Code is the one alt-rock record almost designed to piss off fans.

First of all, there was no real promotional singles for this record outside of Who You Are, who's tribal drumming isn't exactly the most user-friendly of sounds. Across the rest of the record though, there's still a lot of fun to be had here, with Vedder contributing some punk rock moments on Hail Hail and Lukin. On the other side of things, this is also one of the most freewheeling Pearl Jam records ever made, which makes for outlandish ideas like the monolith track Present Tense and even giving Stone Gossard a turn behind the mic on Mankind.

That didn't stop this one from sinking like a stone though, with most of the attention being paid to the band's fight with Ticketmaster rather than the actual music. Even with the dark connotations that come with an album like this, it's still a nice little time capsule to see grunge's greatest band at odds with itself.