The Best 90s Album In The WorldEver!

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It results in killer tunes like “Same Old Show,” based around a surprisingly eerie vocal loop from “On My Radio” by British ska revivalists the Selecter, and “Jump N’ Shout,” with its raucous dancehall reggae vocal and menacing gangsta-strut bass line. Remedy‘s every-which-way creativity also encompasses the Timbaland-style stutter beats of “U Can’t Stop Me” and funk fantasia of “Rendez-Vu” and “Yo-Yo.”“When we started out, we were just trying to be house producers,” says Ratcliffe. “Now that we’ve achieved that, we’re trying not to be house producers.” SIMON REYNOLDS

Cibo Matto’s debut seemed to spring from nowhere (Italy? Japan? New York?), yet it bore recognizable markings: hip-hop beats, piquant samples, ESL food poetry, and girl-power signifying that suggested superhero Venusians who’d learned to smoke from the Beastie Boys. In fact, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda were Japanese transplants to the East Village who had consumed everything from riot grrrl to Brazilian jazz and Yoko Ono while concocting their own mastermix. Says Tim Carr, the A&R man who signed them to Warner Bros.: “Their music reminded me of Nabokov in the U.S. in the way they came here and conquered American pop music in a way nobody who had it as their first language would.” And like Björk, Cibo prove technology and female intuition can groove together, yin-yang-style. “ Viva! La Woman has that element of Miho and I sitting in our living room and talking very privately,” Honda says. “We wanted to celebrate the womanhood.” KATE SULLIVAN In England, Oasis and the rest of the Britpop lot left nearly as big a mark as Nirvana and the other Seattleites. Hip-hop took over the world, and seemed to change shape every few months. Remember when electronica looked like the future? Where do mischief makers like Pavement, Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest fit in? And that’s to say nothing of the totally random ska and swing revivals…although that’s all you’ll hear about it here. Having spent the preceding decade as one of music’s most revered experimental pop acts, for 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, the Flaming Lips jettisoned some of the problematic, self-consciously fey trappings of their previous work and distilled the elements that worked best about their distinctive take on modern pop into song structures that were as accessible as they were adventurous. The result was a deliberately constructed, refined new sound and a landmark album that was both influenced by and superior to the music of its era and which, in retrospect, stands as one of the finest, most important and influential albums of its decade. A testament to careful, selective editing, The Soft Bulletin recast the Flaming Lips as far more than a quirky cult act and laid the groundwork for their commercial and artistic breakthroughs in the years that followed. Keefe Tragically, on March 9, 1997, just as Biggie was celebrating the birth of a son and the impending release of his second album, Life After Death, he was murdered in a still unsolved Los Angeles drive-by. But in a genre of here-today-gone-tomorrow superstars, Ready to Die assures that Biggie will live on. CHEO HODARI COKER

BBC Radio 2's National Album Day collection goes live on Monday 9th October and will be rolled out through the week. Search ‘Radio 2 90s’ to listen.

We heard that a lot during the time we spent preparing this issue. Which is understandable. Pronouncing the 90 greatest albums of the ’90s is a somewhat presumptuous thing to do. When you’re measuring the music this decade is offering to history—the sounds we partied with, copulated to, fought about, and wept over—everyone has an opinion. That ours should be more valid than yours is debatable. But hey—it’s our magazine. But it was the follow-up, Dig Your Own Hole, that spun our world around totally. “ Exit was a complete worldview of what we wanted in music,” Rowlands explains. “ Dig Your Own Hole was a record borne out of where we ended up after Exit—playing a lot of live gigs to bigger audiences. It’s got big feelings, big emotions.” Following the very first National Album Day in 2018, subsequent years have had a specific theme which the BBC has reflected in its content and programming - Celebrating Debut Albums (2022), Celebrating Women in Music (2021), Celebrating the 80s (2020), and ‘Don’t Skip’ to encourage fans to discover albums in full, as a complete body of work (2019).Though Harvey may now question that sort of commitment (last year’s Is This Desire? was considerably less ambitious), To Bring You My Love is the unforgettable sound of someone who plays the dozens with God and the Devil on a daily basis. And Harvey, ever the perfectionist, can’t even bring herself to listen to it. “I would love to,” she says, “but I’d just remember how some guitar part caused me grief and wish that I could change it.” SIA MICHEL Recorded in Berlin after the Wall came down, Achtung Baby did the unimaginable: It made one of the world’s biggest bands seem edgy again. The righteous chest-beating of anthems like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” gave way to a worldly cynicism influenced by media overload and the albums David Bowie and Brian Eno collaborated on in Berlin in the late ’70s. But U2 weren’t pretending to be the Orb; the electronic rhythms and effects are there to shine up singles like “One” and “Mysterious Ways.” Sara Cox’s Half Wower with lots of 90s tunes to get you dancing (available on BBC Sounds from 12 October).

This poisonous sequel to the hardly saccharine Nevermind was heard as a fame-spurning volley in the early-’90s alternawars, but In Utero makes more sense as an honest attempt to portray life with Kurt Cobain’s famous stomach—the measure of beauty available to someone rolling around on a hotel bed, wavering between pain, spew, and fog. It didn’t make Radiohead any happier either. In Meeting People Is Easy, director Grant Gee’s arty documentary about the emotional exhaustion of promoting an album in the age of MTV Singapore, a reporter asks Yorke how he feels about an upcoming show, and the singer replies that he’s terrified. As on Computer, what should be a mindless interaction with the machinery of daily life brings on a nameless dread. “The wheels start turning again and the industry starts moving again,” Yorke says. “It just keeps going—basically outside of our control.” RJ SMITH Fight the power? Fuhgeddaboutit. In the years since that awakening, Rowlands and Chemical sibling Ed Simons have channeled the power into their own mad engines. Their 1995 debut, Exit Planet Dust, was the album that introduced the world to what the Chems had been brewing at the legendary Heavenly Social Club, where the so-called “Big Beat” scene got its start and even Fatboy Slim would stop in to take notes (“That’s why my first album is called Better Living Through Chemistry,” Norman Cook admits. “My girlfriend used to say that all I do is rip off the Chemical Brothers.”) Listening to Warren G’s “Regulate” and Dr. Dre on the radio, the pair were inspired to come up with the nasty roller-disco throwdown of “Da Funk.”“The original riff was actually a siren,” said Bangalter, “but we wanted to make it more of a gangsta rap thing, more dirty, so we changed the sound a bit.” The song ended up a worldwide dance-floor smash, as did Bangalter’s side project Stardust (“Music Sounds Better With You”), and Daft Punk remain one of the world’s most respected club acts. “‘Da Funk’ was a big record for us,” says Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers. “It was so fresh and exciting. We got a very early copy, and it was always part of our set—their records are a dream to DJ.” MIKE RUBIN Shania Twain - Still the One, presented by Scott Mills who introduces a celebration of Shania's iconic 1997 album Come On Over, one of the biggest-selling of all time. The programme includes an interview with Shania, alongside the likes of Lewis Capaldi and Kelsea Ballerini.The Official Most Streamed Albums of the 90s chart features the Top 40 most-streamed albums from the decade, based on UK streams, as compiled exclusively by the Official Charts Company for National Album Day. The Official Top 40 Most Streamed albums of the 90s POS On “Doll Parts,” singer, guitarist, and songwriter Courtney Love dissects herself into slivers. Fake eyes, legs, and arms all fall at odd angles, their connective elastic snapped. When some men want women, they divide them in this way: reduce them to anatomical segments, seize upon a part, and throw away the rest. But L.L. responded with classic Muhammad Ali-style rope-a-dope. Teaming with Juice Crew founder Marley Marl, he stripped his sound down and rediscovered the battle rhymer within. The James Brown sample behind En Vogue’s dance hit “Hold On” was tweaked until it became the rugged street anthem “The Boomin’ System.” The smash “Jingling Baby (Remix)” and the R&B-flavored “Around the Way Girl” asserted that from the dance floor to the boudoir, Ladies still Loved Cool James. Scott Mills’ Wonder Years starting in 1990 and working through the decade, with Scott’s top tune selection (available on BBC Sounds from 10 October).