The Best 90s Album In The WorldEver!

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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 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

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 You voted in your droves to make ‘OK Computer’ your Ultimate 90s Album. Following 1993 debut ‘Pablo Honey’ (containing synonymous single ‘Creep’) and 1995’s acclaimed ‘The Bends’, few could have anticipated the giant leap Radiohead would make on their third record. The Bomb Squad and Cube’s crew, Da Lench Mob, worked 20 hours a day for 26 days straight, trying to make sure Cube not only came with it, but came with it before N.W.A released their next single. The internal and external pressure produced a roiling, thunderous work that hits all the glandular response buttons—repulsing with violent misogyny (“You Can’t Fade Me”) and seducing with superliterary tales from the ‘hood (“Once Upon a Time in the Projects”). “I know we’re all addicted to sex and violence,” Cube said in 1993, “but you’ve got to put some knowledge on top of that, so you can get the medicine you need to fight this beast we’ve got to fight.” AmeriKKKa’s“knowledge” is ugly at times—and on Cube’s later albums, it turned dull and rote—but combined with the Bomb Squad’s unparalleled production, it was frighteningly undeniable. TONY GREEN Nirvana’s commercial breakthrough with ‘Nevermind’ came as a surprise to many - not least of all the band themselves. But the Seattle trio’s 1991 second LP epitomised the flourishing grunge scene as a whole in its exhilarance, irreverence and sheer defiance to the mainstream that it would ultimately change the landscape of. The group would sadly only release one more full-length album (1993’s ‘In Utero’ coming a year before singer Kurt Cobain’s tragic passing), but ‘Nevermind’ was full to the brim of songs that would continue to enthrall listeners - new and old - for the decades to follow: from the pure angst of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ to the quietly haunting ‘Something in the Way’ and sardonic singalong of ‘Lithium’. One of the most bizarre hip-hop albums ever made, this collaboration between eccentric Ultramagnetic MC rapper Kool Keith and San Francisco producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura (with scratching from Invisibl Skratch Piklz turntablist Q-Bert) arrived with the stealth and unreality of an alien visitation—complete with anal probe. Part stand-up comedy routine, part downtempo groove workout, this concept album about the misadventures of a Jupiter-born gynecologist leaves butts wiggling and brains scrambling as listeners try to figure out exactly what to make of Keith’s stream-of-subconsciousness flow (“Paramedics FedEx your legs with eggs you can hatch / Can’t finetooth a dead ex but the skin don’t match”). “It was an album that let you get off all your left-field verses that didn’t make sense,” says Keith.Still, it could have been worse. As Reznor said in 1995, “There was another song that I didn’t put on there called ‘Just Do It.’ It was a very dangerously self-destructive, silly little snippet. You know, ‘If you’re going to kill yourself, just do it, nobody cares at all.’ But [ Downward Spiral coproducer] Flood freaked out and said, ‘No, you’ve gone too far. I don’t want to be involved in that.'”

Following the glossy punk sound of their breakthrough Nevermind, the decision to recruit producer Steve Albini for Nirvana’s follow-up was quite clearly an effort to somehow distance the band from their newfound mainstream success. Albini’s stripped-down approach to recording In Utero caught Cobain and company at their raw and abrasive best, emphatically dispelling claims that the group was selling out. With the album’s gentler moments buried beneath dense cacophony and filthy riffing, the ugly categorically triumphed over the beautiful, warts and all. Jones One of the great artifacts from rap’s coming of age, this second album by the breeziest of the Native Tongues groups was self-aware enough to claim a jazz heritage, yet spry enough to rap about booty, not Dizzy. Bursting with happy, horny life, rappers Phife and the butter-voiced Q-Tip skip along through free associations and Queens reminiscence—letting the ’50s saxes and airy guitar chords behind them invoke the larger context of their travels. Steve Wright says: “The joy of this chart is that it shows which 90s albums have truly endured. And that's because they're all really memorable, really influential, or just really well-loved. It's a great mix, with all the albums you'd expect to be in there and some that, maybe, you wouldn't...” OK Computer debuted at No. 21, then sank like a stone, but during the next year, a growing number of fans were seduced by its cryptic sweep. “People really took to it,” says Greenwood, and the band’s second single, “Karma Police,” went into rotation on MTV.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.” Leave it to Mariah Carey, the girl next door, to make pure lust sound so naive, so syrupy sweet, that it could be read as something pious to a passerby. Leave it to a diva at the height of her fame to describe being horny as feeling “kinda hectic inside,” and to articulate it by singing more dizzying runs than an amusement park’s worth of rides. It feels right that she wrote, produced, and recorded “Fantasy” in only two days, roughly the amount of time a person can live solely on the giddiness of a flirtation and the anticipation of an eventual release. Here’s what love at 26, the age at which she put out the song, could feel like. It’s what you want love to feel like for the rest of your life, too.