While there will be many members of the What Hi-Fi? team, not to mention its readership, who might think that 1994 was roughly six or maybe 15 years ago, it has actually been 30 years since we were treated to one of the most memorable 12 months in recent music history.
Music always reflects and helps to shape the prevailing feel and ethos of any particular time, and this was an age of gritty grunge, angst-ridden indie and heavyweight hip-hop, the likes of which we'll likely never see again. Whether it involves digging out your old flannel shirt or your oversized basketball jersey, it's time to bask in the glory of one very special year from the '90s.
Green Day - Dookie
Call it punk rock, pop punk, skate punk, call it what you will... 1994's Dookie skyrocketed Green Day (and punk rock) into the mainstream and became one of the defining sounds of the 90s alongside Nirvana. Even if you're not a Green Day fan, you'll still know the songs or can sing-shout half the lyrics from this album: Longview, Basket Case, Welcome to Paradise, She, When I Come Around – it's hit after hit. Mike Dirnt's recognisable bass riffs, Tré Cool's powerful drumming and creative fills, and Billie Joe Armstrong's vocals – which veer from bored to aggressive to rebellious to sensitive – all combine to create a melodious ruckus that is at turns life-affirming and makes you want to smash an instrument on the ground.
Armstrong's lyrics are born from being a bored, anxious kid in California, but they are universal themes that strike a chord with most bored, anxious, disaffected teens (and adults) all over the world dealing with relationships and the general humdrum of life. For the musically un-gifted (like myself) there is pure joy in singing/shouting along to the lyrics, knowing it doesn't matter one bit if you can't hit the right notes or carry a tune as long as you inhabit the spirit of punk.
30 years on, Green Day are still rocking out and selling out stadium shows, and this album has even been deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress in the USA. Which is very cool indeed.
Words by Kashfia Kabir
Soundgarden – Superunknown
To my mind, this is the definitive album of 1994 and certainly one of the most influential grunge records ever put together. While legendary Seattle rockers Soundgarden had been ripping it up since the late ‘80s with brash, raw records like Ultramega OK and Louder than Love, Superunknown saw the group both embracing the spirit of the ‘90s and simultaneously helping to forge it through an album that stands alone as the grandaddy of sludgy guitars, nihilistic lyricism and all that lovely misanthropic goodness that the decade demanded.
Dark humour and misanthropy abound within the record’s considerable 70-minute runtime, as do preoccupations with self-hatred (Let Me Drown) and depression (Fell on Black Days, Like Suicide, Head Down and The Day I Tried to Live). Crucially, there’s enough meat, muscle and innovation, not to mention wry self-awareness, to prevent the whole thing from turning into a woe-is-me misery fest. Towering guitars, loaded drums, Cornell’s incomparable pipes and some very out-there time signatures delight and enrapture as much as they depress and dismay.
And, of course, it’s home to the band’s inescapable paean to disillusionment with an increasingly superficial existence, Black Hole Sun.
Words by Harry McKerrell
Listen to Superunknown on Tidal
Nas – Illmatic
Forget confining its legacy to the boundaries of a single year, Nas' Illmatic is the quintessential hip-hop album of the entire decade, an album which encapsulated that immediate, urban style from which countless subsequent artists would take influence.
Like the finest hip-hop offerings, Illmatic immediately positions you in a particular time and place, implanting images of concrete tower blocks, chain link fences and dogs tethered in the backyard. Nas' world is one of respect and loyalty intermingled with desperation and despair, one that runs in parallel to, but entirely separate from, the cosy comforts of suburban America.
Angry, evocative, characterful and poetic, it's unquestionably one of the definitive albums of the 90s, but perhaps we should go further; Illmatic is as close to the blueprint of classic hip-hop as you're ever likely to hear.
Words by Harry McKerrell
Portishead – Dummy
In a sea of American-based grunge, rock and hip-hop dominating this list, that Bristol's trip-hop trio Portishead manages to cut through the sludgy noise with Dummy is pretty amazing. The fact that this incredible album was their debut album is even more astonishing.
It's a slow burn, with steady, hypnotic beats that conjure up images of a moody, bluesy, hazy atmosphere – it's mellow, it's slinky, it's spine-tingling stuff. Beth Gibbons' distinctive vocals are intense, ethereal and dreamy, but in a way that would make Enya shudder with dread. It takes a hi-fi system of serious mettle to deliver the right amount of tension and momentum in Numb, Biscuit and Glory Box, while still letting you sink into the lush textures of the recording.
The band cleverly threads in samples, scratches and loops taken from 60s and 70s recordings, but they also recorded their own music on vinyl records and then used record decks to sample those in, too. Apparently, they even intentionally distressed the records by walking over them on the studio floor to get that "vintage" sound. Blatant vandalism of the vinyl format aside, Dummy is a blend of techniques, influences and a tapestry of sound that remains as unique as when it was first released.
Words by Kashfia Kabir
Stone Temple Pilots – Purple
While the central Seattle grunge quadrumvirate of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam have all earned their respective flowers, either at the time or retrospectively, it always felt as though Stone Temple Pilots were grunge’s odd man out. That feels odd to say considering the San Diego outfit has shipped more than 40 million albums worldwide, but there still seems to be a small whiff of snobbery that excludes the band from “serious” consideration.
Snobbery be damned. Purple followed the success of 1992’s dirty, hard-edged debut Core with verve and style, lightening the band’s sonic palette just a tad while making it clear that this was a group capable of whacking out a decent melody. Army Ants and Unglued are the straightforward belters that could almost have been lifted from Nirvana’s Nevermind, whereas Interstate Love Song quietens things down to provide an oasis of radio-friendly balladry.
A fantastic album from top to bottom.
Words by Harry McKerrell
Jeff Buckley – Grace
Let’s get one thing straight: Jeff Buckley was not an overhyped nepo baby who only made three good songs. He had at least four.
Grace snuck into the top 150 of Rolling Stones’ "500 Greatest Albums" rundown a few years back, but they put Drake’s Take Care at 95, so take that as you please. Unlike Canada’s worst-ever export, Grace is the definitive demonstration of how to ride a line between sensuality and vulnerability, a record that explores the two main contrasting elements of Buckley’s personality: the hopeless romantic and the red-blooded lover-boy rockstar.
He certainly had the chops to back it up. With a falsetto that soars and echoes, Buckley imbues standout tracks such as Lover You Should Have Come Over and Last Goodbye with an ethereal sense of longing, all at once a wounded animal and a semi-divine being seeking out some earthly pleasure. Overblown enough to make Nick Cave wince but endlessly enjoyable because of it, Grace is a sordid yet spiritual experience, like having a bath of champagne in an old church.
Words by Harry McKerrell
The Prodigy – Music For the Jilted Generation
1994 wasn’t just a year for misunderstood shoegazers and lovelorn indie boys, it was also a time for pilled-up (possibly) ravers to don their hi-vis and get absolutely unhinged. If Radiohead's arrival saw listeners crying in their bedrooms, the Prodigy were the adrenaline-fuelled antidote to an era of anxiety.
What better way to get all of that angst and anti-authoritarian sentiment out of your system than with The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation, the predecessor to 1997’s The Fat of the Land which saw the English electro-pioneers hitting their stride with one of the most visceral and blood-bumping techno/dance albums ever.
Visceral really is the word. Even if you don’t have access to some naughty substances and a time machine to take you back 30 years, it’s hard not to be utterly absorbed by the trippy, feverish nature of what is surely the group’s first real masterpiece. Poison, Voodoo People, Full Throttle; every excuse you need to get your amp cranked and your pulse racing as you don your finest fluorescent jacket.
Words by Harry McKerrell
Listen to Music for the Jilted Generation on Tidal
Buy Music for the Jiltered Generation on Amazon
Weezer – Weezer (The Blue Album)
Weezer’s debut effort is such an oddity that it borders on sheer paradox. At a time when grunge was taking over the world (or at least the very small, misanthropic corner dressed in flannel shirts and oversized denim), The Blue Album proved that rock could still wear its pop-inspired heart on its t-shirt sleeve.
And yet there’s still that odd melding of vulnerability and darkness that made Kurt Cobain and co. strike such a chord with younger audiences. Say It Ain’t So’s massive, crunchy power chords are right out of the grunge playbook, while lyrics dealing with fears of alcoholism and the family breakdown wouldn’t sound odd coming out of Cobain’s own mouth. Buddy Holly might have been semi-parodic, but it still feels like the sort of song Nirvana might have written if they’d taken the pop influences displayed on, say, About A Girl and taken them to their logical conclusion.
Words by Harry McKerrell
Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral
The Downward Spiral is not an easy listen. Hardly the sort of music you stick on if you want a relaxing summer afternoon to forget your woes, it's a record that can often feel like an anxiety attack set to music. Nine Inch Nails' magnum opus isn't about forgetting your troubles, it's about facing them head-on, digging down into the deep recesses of the soul and pulling out the ugly truths within. It's cheaper than therapy, certainly.
Yet the record's sheer quality and depth make it hard to ignore. Crammed full of disconcerting, often atonal soundscapes, weird percussive passages and Trent Reznor's voice fluctuating from a whisper to a shout, it's become as popular in our hi-fi test rooms as it has in teenage bedrooms.
So much texture and raw emotion for the finest systems to dig out.
Words by Harry McKerrell
Listen to The Downward Spiral on Tidal
Buy The Downward Spiral on Amazon
Notorious B.I.G – Ready to Die
It’s crazy to think that 1994’s Ready to Die was the first of a duo of albums that The Notorious B.I.G. would ever release. Considering he’s still such a towering figure in the world of East Coast hip-hop, it’s jarring to consider that Biggie, who died when he was just 24, only released two full studio albums by the time of his death in 1997.
The fact that he’s still such a colossal name should give a clear indication of the influence left by those two records, with Ready to Die cementing a legacy in the same stroke that it started one. Bold and brash yet with lyrics that wended their way through the dense forests of depression through to more hopeful, even humourous plains, it’s a totemic record that hits as hard as it did 30 years ago.
Words by Harry McKerrell
Listen to Ready to Die on Tidal
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