Best ’90s Alternative Rock Vinyl Reissues

Pixies

Remastered

Kurt Cobain famously said Nirvana was “trying to rip off the Pixies,” borrowing their loud-quiet-loud dynamics for songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Bossanova, the Pixies’ third album, leans further into surf-rock and sci-fi imagery than Doolittle, trading some of that record’s chaos for atmosphere, but Black Francis’s scream-to-whisper dynamics remained as influential as ever.

Dinosaur Jr.

Reissue · Green

Dinosaur Jr.’s major label debut found J Mascis playing nearly every instrument himself, with only drummer Murph remaining from the band’s earlier lineup. Green Mind balances the band’s noisy indie-rock roots with newly melodic songwriting, and its blend of buried vocals, towering guitar solos, and slacker cool influenced a generation of bands that followed.

Temple of the Dog

Reissue, Remastered, Repress · Gatefold, 180 Gram

A one-off supergroup formed to memorialize Mother Love Bone’s Andrew Wood, Temple of the Dog brought together Chris Cornell and members of Soundgarden with a then-unknown Eddie Vedder, freshly arrived in Seattle and about to form Pearl Jam. Recorded in just 15 days, the album, and especially “Hunger Strike,” Cornell and Vedder’s duet, became an unlikely landmark of the grunge era almost by accident.

The Smashing Pumpkins

Reissue, Remastered · 180 Gram, 35th Anniversary

Before Siamese Dream made them arena headliners, The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1991 debut Gish laid the groundwork: heavier and more psychedelic than what followed, produced by Butch Vig in the same year he’d go on to make Nevermind. It’s a less polished, more exploratory record than the band’s later work, and a good reminder of how strange and heavy their early sound really was.

Mudhoney

Reissue

One of Sub Pop’s earliest and most important signings, Mudhoney helped define the raw, fuzzed-out sound that would become known as grunge years before it broke nationally. Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge is looser and more garage-punk than the bands that followed them to the mainstream, a reminder of where the Seattle sound actually started.

Hole

Released just days after Kurt Cobain’s death, Live Through This became inseparable from a tragedy it never asked to be tied to. On its own terms, though, it’s one of the most ferocious and confrontational records of the decade. Courtney Love’s songwriting swings between rage and vulnerability across songs like “Violet” and “Doll Parts,” and the album’s mix of pop hooks and abrasive noise made Hole’s version of alt-rock impossible to ignore.

The Toadies

Reissue, Remastered

Fort Worth’s Toadies scored an unlikely platinum hit with Rubberneck, powered by the alternately hushed and explosive “Possum Kingdom.” Named for the real Texas lake but built from a story frontman Todd Lewis has said he made up rather than any true event, the song still fuels local debate over what it’s actually about. The rest of the album is just as dark and wiry, a snapshot of Texas alt-rock that stands apart from the grunge dominating the charts at the time.

Radiohead

Reissue

Radiohead’s 1995 follow-up to Pablo Honey is where the band first showed the ambition that would define the rest of their career, trading their one-hit “Creep” reputation for a set of widescreen guitar songs built on Jonny Greenwood’s textures and Thom Yorke’s falsetto. The Bends remains a touchstone of ’90s alternative rock and the clearest bridge between Britpop-era guitar music and the more experimental records Radiohead would go on to make.

Alice In Chains

Recorded for MTV in April 1996, Unplugged was Alice In Chains’ first concert since early 1994, when Layne Staley’s addiction had pulled the band off the road for years. Stripped of distortion, songs like “Down in a Hole” and “Nutshell” hit even harder, and the set is widely regarded as one of the strongest entries in the entire Unplugged series, one of the last times fans saw the full band play together.

Deftones

Reissue · 180 Gram

Deftones’ 1997 breakthrough Around the Fur took the churning riffs of nu-metal and pushed them somewhere stranger and more melodic, pairing Chino Moreno’s alternately whispered and screamed vocals with Stephen Carpenter’s detuned guitar work. Singles like “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” set the band apart from their late-’90s peers almost immediately, and the album is still considered one of the genre’s high-water marks.