Nevermind
1991
The baby on the cover was paid two hundred dollars. Four months after release it knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the chart.
★ 9.7
Browse by time · decade
1990s
1990 – 1999
Showing 90 albums from the 1990s
OK Computer
1997
Recorded in a fifteenth-century mansion the band rented from an actress, with one track narrated entirely by the computer voice on a Macintosh.
★ 9.4
Illmatic
1994
Ten tracks, under forty minutes, made by a twenty-year-old with the best producers in New York each giving him one beat.
★ 9.3
Ready to Die
1994
The opening traces his life from the delivery room to prison in about three minutes. Puffy made him rewrite half of it for radio.
★ 9.1
Automatic for the People
1992
They set out to make a loud record and ended up with a quiet one. John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin wrote the string parts.
★ 8.9
Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
1993
RZA negotiated a deal letting every member sign solo elsewhere, then recorded the group in a basement on deliberately cheap, muddy equipment.
★ 8.9
The Chronic
1992
Dre had session players replay the funk records rather than sample them, which sidestepped clearance and made everything sound warmer and slower.
★ 8.8
The Low End Theory
1991
Ron Carter, who played bass with Miles Davis, appears on one track and made them promise there would be no swearing on it.
★ 8.8
Aquemini
1998
Rosa Parks sued them over the song named after her, and the case ran for a decade. The record itself goes everywhere at once.
★ 8.7
Life After Death
1997
It came out sixteen days after Biggie was shot dead in Los Angeles, a double album he had finished and titled beforehand.
★ 8.6
The Bends
1995
They were exhausted and sick of being the Creep band, and nearly fell apart making it. Nothing on it sounds anything like Creep.
★ 8.4
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
1991
Producer Rick Rubin moved the band into a Hollywood mansion they were convinced was haunted. Guitarist John Frusciante quit within a year of its release.
★ 8.3
Doggystyle
1993
Snoop was on trial for murder while promoting it. It was the first debut album in history to enter the chart at number one.
★ 8.3
Fear of a Black Planet
1990
Their production team piled so many samples into each track that the record could not legally be made today. Nothing since sounds this crowded.
★ 8.3
Achtung Baby
1991
They went to Berlin just after the Wall came down, argued badly enough to nearly break up, and got the song One out of it.
★ 8.3
Dummy
1994
They recorded their own samples, pressed them onto vinyl, and scratched the records up so the finished album would crackle like something older.
★ 8.1
The Black Album
1991
The producer Bob Rock made them play together in one room instead of tracking separately, which took a year and nearly ended the band.
★ 8.0
Midnight Marauders
1993
A synthesized voice introduces the tracks like a museum tour guide, and the cover is a grid of about seventy other rappers' faces.
★ 8.0
Reasonable Doubt
1996
No label would sign him, so Jay-Z started his own with two friends and sold the CDs out of the trunk of a car.
★ 8.0
Violator
1990
The band announced a signing at a Los Angeles record shop and around seventeen thousand people came, which ended with riot police.
★ 7.9
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
1998
Hill recorded much of it in Bob Marley's old studio in Kingston, and the classroom scenes between songs use actual schoolchildren.
★ 7.9
(What's the Story) Morning Glory?
1995
Noel Gallagher wrote most of these songs in a fortnight. A year later, two and a half million people applied to see the band at Knebworth.
★ 7.8
2001
1999
Dre hired live musicians instead of sampling, and had Jay-Z write the words to Still D.R.E. for him. Eminem turns up throughout.
★ 7.7
Endtroducing.....
1996
Built entirely out of other people's records, on a single sampler, in the basement of a Sacramento record shop full of unsorted vinyl.
★ 7.6
Grace
1994
Buckley's voice covers about four octaves and he uses most of them. He drowned in the Mississippi three years later, aged thirty.
★ 7.6
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
1998
Jeff Mangum wrote it after reading Anne Frank's diary, played a musical saw on it, and then more or less disappeared for a decade.
★ 7.6
Mezzanine
1998
The three of them fell out badly making it, and Elizabeth Fraser sang Teardrop while grieving for Jeff Buckley, who had just drowned.
★ 7.6
MTV Unplugged in New York
1993
Cobain asked for lilies and candles on the set, refused to play the hits, and was dead five months later.
★ 7.5
Odelay
1996
The Dust Brothers spent two years layering it out of junk-shop records. The dog on the cover is a Komondor caught mid-jump.
★ 7.5
Rage Against the Machine
1992
The sleeve insists there are no samples or keyboards anywhere. Every strange noise is Tom Morello working the pickup switch and scraping the strings.
★ 7.5
Slanted and Enchanted
1992
Recorded for about eight hundred dollars in the drummer's garage in Stockton. He later took to greeting the audience with handstands.
★ 7.5
Superunknown
1994
Singer Chris Cornell wrote Black Hole Sun in about fifteen minutes. Much of the rest is in time signatures that make nodding along hard.
★ 7.4
Ten
1991
The band were called Mookie Blaylock after a basketball player until the label objected, and the album is named for his shirt number.
★ 7.4
The Downward Spiral
1994
Trent Reznor made almost all of it alone. Johnny Cash covered Hurt nine years later and Reznor said the song no longer felt like his.
★ 7.4
All Eyez on Me
1996
Recorded in a hurry after Suge Knight bailed him out of prison, hip hop's first great double album. He was dead within the year.
★ 7.1
ATLiens
1996
André 3000 had stopped drinking and eating meat, and the change shows: the record is cooler and stranger than anything Atlanta had made before.
★ 7.1
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
1998
Williams spent six years on it, scrapped a finished version, and fell out with two producers before she would let anyone release it.
★ 7.0
Exile in Guyville
1993
Phair wrote it as a song-by-song answer to Exile on Main St., in the same running order, from home cassettes she had made alone.
★ 6.9
Liquid Swords
1995
Dialogue from a dubbed samurai film runs between the tracks, spoken by a child, which is where the record gets its atmosphere.
★ 6.9
Loveless
1991
Kevin Shields plays with the tremolo arm held bent while he strums, which is what makes the chords sag. It nearly bankrupted the label.
★ 6.9
Me Against the World
1995
He was in prison when it reached number one, the first artist that had ever happened to. He recorded it before going in.
★ 6.8
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
1995
It came out on a purple cassette, and Ghostface Killah appears on so much of it that people argue whose album it really is.
★ 6.8
Ray of Light
1998
Madonna had trained her voice for a year to play Evita, which is why she suddenly sounds like she can sing. William Orbit did the rest.
★ 6.8
Siamese Dream
1993
Billy Corgan played nearly all the guitar and bass himself, and some songs carry dozens of layered guitar tracks stacked on top of each other.
★ 6.7
Time Out of Mind
1997
Dylan had not released an album of new songs in seven years, and recorded these in Miami with a dozen musicians playing at once.
★ 6.7
Things Fall Apart
1999
Questlove and Black Thought began by busking on Philadelphia street corners, which is why a live band plays everything here rather than a sampler.
★ 6.7
Weezer (The Blue Album)
1994
Ric Ocasek of the Cars produced it, and Spike Jonze cut the Buddy Holly video into an old episode of Happy Days.
★ 6.7
The Infamous...
1995
Havoc and Prodigy were nineteen when they made it. Q-Tip helped with the production and is credited on the sleeve under a false name.
★ 6.6
Check Your Head
1992
They picked their instruments back up and built a studio with a skate ramp in it, which is roughly how the record sounds.
★ 6.1
Dirt
1992
Singer Layne Staley wrote most of it about his own heroin addiction, and the band recorded it in Los Angeles while the city was burning.
★ 6.1
Either/Or
1997
Smith doubles his own voice on almost every song, which is why it sounds like two people whispering the same thing slightly apart.
★ 6.1
Out of Time
1991
Losing My Religion is built on a mandolin guitarist Peter Buck had just bought and was learning. They refused to tour the album at all.
★ 6.0
Pinkerton
1996
Named after a character in Madame Butterfly. It failed so badly that Rivers Cuomo disowned it for a decade before everyone decided it was great.
★ 6.0
The Score
1996
Recorded in a basement studio in New Jersey for about a hundred thousand dollars, and Killing Me Softly was a Roberta Flack hit from 1973.
★ 5.9
The Slim Shady LP
1999
Dr. Dre heard the demo through Jimmy Iovine and signed him within days. Eminem had been washing dishes in a Detroit restaurant.
★ 5.9
Wildflowers
1994
Petty recorded far more than would fit and left around fifteen songs off, some of which stayed unreleased for another twenty-five years.
★ 5.8
Agaetis Byrjun
1999
The singer, Jónsi, plays his guitar with a cello bow and sings in a language he invented. The title means, roughly, a good beginning.
★ 5.8
Black on Both Sides
1999
Mos Def plays several of the instruments himself, and opens by pointing out that hip hop cannot be doing well if its people are not.
★ 5.7
Californication
1999
Guitarist John Frusciante rejoined after years of addiction, having to relearn how to play, and wrote the melodies that sold fifteen million copies.
★ 5.7
Badmotorfinger
1991
It came out two weeks after Nevermind and got buried. Soundgarden spent the tour opening for Guns N' Roses instead.
★ 5.5
Death Certificate
1991
Cube split it into a death side and a life side. Several chains refused to stock it and Billboard ran an editorial against it.
★ 5.5
Harvest Moon
1992
Ringing ears from his previous, much louder album meant Young had to play quietly, so he called the band back and made a sequel.
★ 5.4
Homework
1997
Made in a bedroom on borrowed equipment and never meant to be an album, just a run of tracks that kept getting finished.
★ 5.4
Vol. 2...Hard Knock Life
1998
Jay-Z sampled children singing from the musical Annie for the title track, an idea nobody around him thought would work until it did.
★ 5.4
Being There
1996
Singer Jeff Tweedy asked the label to sell the double album at single-album price and took the royalty cut himself so people could afford it.
★ 5.1
CrazySexyCool
1994
Lisa Lopes burned down her boyfriend's house while they were making it. The album sold over twenty million and the group still went bankrupt.
★ 5.1
Daily Operation
1992
DJ Premier chopped the loops so short they barely repeat, and Guru delivers everything in the same flat voice, which somehow makes it land harder.
★ 5.1
Mama Said Knock You Out
1990
The title is what his grandmother told him when critics said he was finished. Marley Marl produced it and the comeback worked.
★ 5.0
Resurrection
1994
The famous song describes hip hop as a woman he has known since childhood. Ice Cube took it personally and started a feud.
★ 4.9
Ridin' Dirty
1996
There were no singles and no videos, and it sold on word of mouth across the South while nobody in New York noticed.
★ 4.9
Step In the Arena
1991
This is where DJ Premier worked out his method of chopping a record into single notes and rebuilding the melody from the pieces.
★ 4.9
Use Your Illusion I
1991
Both volumes were recorded together and released the same day, because the band could not agree on what to leave off a single album.
★ 4.8
Use Your Illusion II
1991
Knockin' on Heaven's Door is a Bob Dylan song written for a western. The video for Estranged cost around four million dollars to make.
★ 4.8
Vs.
1993
The band refused to make videos for any of it, and it sold nearly a million copies in five days anyway.
★ 4.8
Vitalogy
1994
It came out on vinyl two weeks before the CD, and the sleeve reproduces an 1899 medical book the band found and liked.
★ 4.8
What's the 411?
1992
Blige was discovered from a karaoke tape recorded in a shopping mall, and the title comes from the phrase for asking someone's business.
★ 4.8
XO
1998
Smith had just played the Academy Awards in a white suit, in front of an audience that had no idea who he was.
★ 4.8
93 'til Infinity
1993
They were teenagers when they made it, rapping fast over a Billy Cobham loop about doing very little on a warm Oakland afternoon.
★ 4.5
Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde
1992
They started out as dancers, and it shows in how loose the record is. Their producer J-Swift built the beats out of jazz records.
★ 4.5
Breaking Atoms
1991
Nas was seventeen and turns up for one verse near the end, which is where most people first heard him.
★ 4.5
Capital Punishment
1998
The first solo album by a Latino rapper to go platinum. Big Pun was dead of a heart attack two years later, at twenty-eight.
★ 4.5
Cypress Hill
1991
B-Real pitched his voice up into that nasal whine on purpose, because he thought his normal one was too easy to ignore.
★ 4.4
Regulate...G Funk Era
1994
The hit is built on a Michael McDonald song from 1982. Warren G is Dr. Dre's stepbrother and got nowhere near his budget.
★ 4.3
Sublime
1996
Bradley Nowell's dalmatian appears on the cover and in half the songs. He died two months before the record came out.
★ 4.3
The Diary
1994
Scarface came out of the Geto Boys and produced much of this himself. He talks over the beats as often as he raps.
★ 4.3
Clandestino
1998
Chao recorded it on a portable eight-track while moving around Latin America, singing in five languages about people crossing borders without papers.
★ 4.0
Monster
1994
They plugged back in on purpose after two quiet albums, and for years it was the record most often found in second-hand shops.
★ 3.6
Uptown Saturday Night
1997
Named after a 1974 Sidney Poitier film. Luchini is built on a Dynasty record, and the pair's slang was obscure enough that listeners traded translations.
★ 3.3
The Bluegrass Sessions
1999
Fleck plays banjo in styles bluegrass had no name for, surrounded by the best acoustic players alive, none of whom show off.
★ 2.8