A couple times a year you get a week where everyone seems to have decided that this is when they’re gonna release their new album, and this is one of those. I review nine albums today including a few that are end of the year Top 10 contenders. They include: The Hard Quartet (Malkmus / Sweeney / White / Kelly), MEMORIALS (new band featuring Electrelane’s Verity Susman), A Place to Bury Strangers, Caribou, the solo debut from black midi’s Geordie Greep, Norwegian band Casiokids‘ first album in 13 years, shoegaze/psych vets Medicine, San Francisco’s Cindy, and more.

This week’s Indie Basement Classic is the final album from Electrelane.

It’s a much, much bigger week in Notable Releases with 15 reviews including The Smile and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (both of which I like), Blood Incantation, Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn, Drug Church and lots more.

This was also a big news with with album announcements from The Weather Station, The Horrors (first in eight years), Ela Minus, and Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom (a holiday album!).

If you’re not caught up on September, I rounded up the month’s best songs and albums. If you want to look ahead, check out BrooklynVegan’s Most Anticipated Albums of Fall 2024.

Head below for all of this week’s reviews…

ALBUM OF THE WEEK #1: MEMORIALS – Memorial Waterslide (Fire)
Corker of a debut album from the duo of Electrelane’s Verity Susmann and Wire guitarist Matthew Simms

After releasing two terrific documentary soundtracks last year, duo MEMORIALS (Electrene’s Verity Susman and Wire/It Hugs Back’s Matthew Simms) have delivered their proper debut album and what a treat it is. If you miss Electrelane like I do, and actually remember what It Hugs Back (who were signed to 4AD) sounded like, MEMORIALS is a very satisfying synthesis of both. Memorial Waterslides starts with a bang: “Acceptable Experience” is a groovy, psychedelic blast featuring a propulsive rhythm section, droney/Doors-y organ and amazing harmony vocals from Susman. Having her sing again is the biggest appeal for this group, in my opinion, and it’s wild to think she hasn’t done so on record for over a decade before this group. Musically, MEMORIALS are in that Stereolab/Broadcast/Soundcarriers world of dark, swirling psychedelia but Sussman makes it unique and decidedly more human and approachable. She and Simms are definitely left of center musicians who hold Can, Neu!, and The United States of America (the ’60s band) dear, but they are pop songwriters at heart whose songs deliver relatable sentiments like “I want to be the one still dancing when the lights turn on.” That’s from “Lamplighter,” the album’s giddiest, most approachable earworm, but also one that features a homemade tape machine mellotron that Sussman and Simms built just for this song. (It’s also a song where the very next lyric references 17th century British satirist Fanny Burney.) And that’s this album, and MEMORIALS, in a nutshell: they take the unconventional path to a friendly destination and the music is better for it every time.

Memorial Waterslides by MEMORIALS

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ALBUM OF THE WEEK #2: The Hard Quartet – The Hard Quartet (Matador)
Stephen Malkmus may be the best known member of this supergroup, but their debut album is greater than the sum of its parts

“This is not a project—it’s a band,” Stephen Malkmus told GQ of his new group with seasoned players Matt Sweeney (Chavez), Jim White (The Dirty Three), and Emmett Kelly (Ty Segall, Cairo Gang). “We’re all jazzed.” Listening to their debut album, it’s hard to argue with Malkmus. While all four had previously collaborated with other members of the group, The Hard Quartet marks the first time they’d collaborated as a unit. They say there was instant chemistry, though, and with three songwriters they had nearly an album’s worth of songs after the first week of playing together. They wrote so many songs, in fact, that their debut is a double, but it’s one that sails by thanks to the variety and quality on display here.

Variety is really the key to The Hard Quartet; Malkmus, Sweeney, and Kelly all bring songs to the group, each with a distinct but complementary style. All four are credited with the music but usually the lyrics are by the lead vocalist. Malkmus delivers lots of memorable, very Malkmus’ lines (“Denim and door knobs that was our kink,” “Can you dredge emotion from me?”), a couple of his most Pavement-y songs since Pavement (“Thug Dynasty,” “Renegade”), at least three songs that reference rats, and one of his sweetest love songs ever (“Hey”). Sweeney, meanwhile, brings swagger on “Rio’s Song” and “It Suits You,” and folky choogle on “Jacked Existence” and “Killed by Death” which is one of the best songs on the album. Kelly contributes two but they’re both great: the jangly, bittersweet “Our Hometown Boy,” and the dirgey “North of the Border.” As for White, who does let his Aussie accent fly, briefly, on “Action for the Military Boys,” he brings his dexterous, wide-range of skills behind the kit. It’s rare for him these days to play such a straight-ahead rock and this album make you glad someone is having him do it here. They are a cohesive unit, this Hard Quartet, a real, very good band, who hopefully will continue beyond this great record.

The Hard Quartet by The Hard Quartet

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Caribou – Honey (Merge)
Dan Snaith merges his Daphni and Caribou sides, and adds a third via AI-altered vocals, for his most club-oriented album to date

Dan Snaith has lived two musical lives for the last decade, with his psychedelic, subtler, more song-oriented side as Caribou (who are also an amazing live band), and the sample-forward, pure club euphoria of Daphni. Honey, the sixth Caribou album, feels like it’s a merger of the two. It’s got the highest banger quotient of any Caribou album, and almost feels like a tight, impeccable 40-minute DJ set, full of crowd-pleasing drops, hooks, clever samples, a wide variety of dance styles (French Touch, footwork, techno, etc) and satisfying callbacks (the hook of opener “Broke My Heart” comes back later in the album on “Campfire”). But it’s also got the well-crafted songs you expect from Caribou.

The newest, and potentially most controversial element to Honey is the vocals. If you’re like me you might be wondering while listening (or dancing), “who is singing on this?” Turns out it’s all Dan, as he ran his vocals through an AI program to make them sound like he was another person. “I found it impossible to resist trying it, and once I’d tried it, it was impossible to look away,” Dan says in the album’s bio. “I think the central thing that drew me to using this technology on this album was that if I listened closely, I could still hear myself in there when I tried on different voices using AI. It still captures all the phrasing, the pitch imperfections, the delivery, the breath…even when turning it into someone else’s voice. It sounds both very much not like me but also like me.”

Already a huge, exacting tech nerd whose last album took years to create from over 900 micro-loops, Snaith sees AI as he uses it as just another tool not that different from pitch-shifters, vocoders or autotune, and I mostly agree (in this specific case). You listen to Suddenly and this and you can tell it’s the same human singing here, even if it sounds at first like someone else. You can definitely argue why not just have someone else sing, and he takes it a little too far a couple times, but on singles like “Come Find Me,” “Broke My Heart,” and “Volume” (a reinterpretation of M/A/R/R/S’ classic “Pump Up the Volume”) you’re too busy dancing to ever notice.

Honey by Caribou

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Medicine – Medicine (Laner Archive)
Trippy 11th album from these underrated shoegaze vets

Shoegaze has never been more popular than it is right now and one of the best, most underrated bands of the original era, Medicine, are still at it and making amazing records that continue to fly under the radar. Their self-titled 11th album (and second of 2024) keeps the core of what Brad Laner, Jim Goodall and Julia Monreal do intact — Beach Boys melodies and harmonies paired with technicolor arrangements, wild studio sonic trickery and gonzo drumming — while shifting focus slightly. The spotlight on Medicine is really on the vocals and drumming this time, with Monreal and Laner’s harmonies majorly warped with psychedelic effects and very high in the mix as Goodall’s drums crash in near-constant fill mode. It’s trippier that 2023’s Silences, though not quite as magical, but still worth your time. All the up-and-comers could learn a thing or two from the creativity found here.

Medicine by Medicine

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A Place To Bury Strangers – Synthesizer (Dedstrange)
This may be the only album to feature both killer pysch-rock and an album cover that you can convert into a working, very weird synthesizer

Long touted as Brooklyn’s loudest band (arguable), A Place to Bury Strangers have been laying waste to audiences’ inner ears and the band’s own instruments for nearly 20 years. Founding member Oliver Ackermann, who also runs the Death by Audio pedal company, has reinvented the group a few times in the last two decades (they’re currently a trio), though APTBS’ sound has stayed much the same: the kind of dark, adrenalized psych-rock descended from The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine and drenched in wild effects and noise. It’s business as usual on Synthesizer, the group’s seventh album, and that’s just fine. Few do it better than APTBS and there are big hooks and melodic basslines under the squall (see “Don’t Be Sorry” and “You Got Me”) and they’ve still got the power to blow your hair back on tracks like “Bad Idea.” Ackermann does innovate on this one though, via its packaging which merges his two main worlds. The cover art doesn’t just look like a circuit board, it IS a circuit board and if you buy the optional kit, Synthesizer becomes an actual, if very weird, working synth. Pretty cool.

Synthesizer by A Place To Bury Strangers

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Geordie Greep – The New Sound (Rough Trade)
The solo debut from the black midi frontman has something from everyone…to love and loathe

You know the story about how the band on the Titanic kept playing as the ship sank into the North Atlantic? That’s what the debut album from black midi’s Geordie Greep sounds like, if he was a loungey cruiseship bandleader who sticks to his setlist on the lido deck as its comes under attack by pirate terrorists off the coast of Puerto Vallarta. The New Sound is a bloodbath and a party, which is what you should expect from the singer/guitarist of a prog punk band who now no longer has to answer to anyone but himself. Made with over 30 session musicians in São Paulo and London, this is one of the wildest swings of the year: knotty rock fused with tropicalia, salsa, disco and jazz played as the final 63 minutes of a 24-hour dance marathon where the remaining participants, musicians included, are totally out of their minds, exhausted and manic. Greep inhabits the character of a blowhard lothario, alternately making passes and hurling put-downs at anything that moves, singing in a voice that requires a new measurement for over-the-top. The New Sound has something for everyone, to love and loathe; it’s both bravura and maddening. I guess that’s a recommendation.

The New Sound by Geordie Greep

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Casiokids – Tid for hjem (Jansen Records)
First album in 13 years from “Norway’s Hot Chip” is a welcome return

Casiokids earned the reputation as “Norway’s Hot Chip,” in the late-’00s thanks to a string of great singles that were as irresistible and danceable as the titles were hard to pronounce for non Norwegians (“Verdens største land” and “Fot I hose” are bangers in any language), not to mention a fantastic live show. The band never broke up, but went into hibernation not long after releasing 2011’s Aabenbaringen Over Aaskammen. Thirteen years later, they’ve back and sounding much like they always have: DIY dance music that welcomes tropicalia, afroboeat and anyone within earshot to their distinctly Scandinavian party. They’ve also still got a knack with festival-ready choruses, infectious hooks, and irresistible beats, not to mention their distinctive falsetto vocals. “Brunsniggelen” and “Karibisk stemning” show they haven’t lost their touch, and “Ein levende linjal” and “Når eg ser deg” find them widening their range into atmospheric dreampop territory. “Tid for hjem” translates to “Time to go home,” but it sounds like the party is only just getting started.

Tid for hjem by Casiokids

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The Smashing Times – Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys (K Records)
DIY twee Anglophelia runs free on this Baltimore band’s first album for K

If Baltimore band The Smashing Times’ name and the title of their album didn’t clue you in that they are extreme Anglophiles of a very specific variety, then the music should. With it’s jangly guitars, twee melodies, reverby DIY production, and faux British accents, Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys just oozes Carnaby Street, Beatles knockoffs, Village Green-era Kinks, Television Personalities (and Dan Treacy’s Whaam Records), Martin Newell’s Cleaners From Venus, pre-MBV Creation Records, ascots, and other UK signifiers. Decidedly mellow, The Smashing Times don’t go as far with the schtick as Mick Trouble, and neither are their songs as immediately hooky, but if you’ve read this far into this short review, I predict that A) you’re gonna like this, and B) you’ve already hit play.

Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys by The Smashing Times

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Cindy – Swan Lake (Tough Love)
Gentle sounds in a perfect fun-sized package

Listening to Swan Lake, I’m pretty sure that the EP is the perfect delivery vehicle for the hushed, gentle sounds of San Francisco band Cindy. At 17 minutes, you can absorb all they have to offer — delicately strummed guitars, laconic and warm melodies, the library-quiet vocals of songwriter/guitarist Karina Gill – while staying entranced and ready to hit play on the whole thing again. First song “All Weekend” is the standout but the vibes are so good you glady stick around for another spin though all six songs. Swan Lake is a perfect little treasure.

Swan Lake by Cindy

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INDIE BASEMENT CLASSIC: Electrelane – No Shouts No Calls (Too Pure, 2007)
Brighton cult indie band went out on a high with their fourth and best album

Electrelane were never groundbreakers; the all-female four-piece from Brighton, England made drony, motorik indie rock that favored jamming on two chords or less with guitars and ’60s organs a la Neu! or The Velvet Underground. They were very good at what they did, however, and definitely carved out their own niche within that genre that also included Broadcast, Yo La Tengo, and Too Pure labelmates Stereolab (who they got compared to constantly). That came, in part, via Verity Susman’s fragile voice and relatable lyrics, and the band’s harmonies. They had a breakthrough with 2004’s Albini-recorded The Power Out (single “On Parade” was prominently featured in a first season episode of The OC), but they saved the best for last with 2007’s No Shouts No Calls which they released six months before going on “indefinite hiatus.” The music and melodies had never been so nuanced, and Susman’s lyrics and vocals had never been so affecting. These songs are full of heartbreak and really stick with you, from pleas of “Come back, come back!” on single “To the East” to string-filled, deeply romanic “In Berlin” where Susman’s voices sends shivers as she sings “If we freeze I want to freeze next to you.” (Electrelane also could move you as much with “oooohs” as any actual words.) I’m glad Susman is in a band again (MEMORIALS who are great, scroll up), but No Shouts, No Calls — my favorite album of 2007 — is still for me the best record she’s made so far.

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Creation Records’ 21 Best Records

21. Biff Bang Pow! – Oblivion (1987)

Alan McGee wasn’t just the head of Creation Records, he was also one its musical artists, involved in a few projects over the years, including Laughing Apple, Revolving Paint Dream and his longest-running group, Biff Bang Pow! that also featured, at various points, label co-founders Dick Green and Joe Foster, as well as Primal Scream’s Andrew Innes. Oblivion, the second of two albums Biff Bang Pow! released in 1987, is the group’s best record, full of the sort of jangly pastiche psychedelia you’d expect from a band that, like his label, were named after ’60s beat group The Creation. McGee’s a better songwriter than he is a singer but his fey vocal style works just fine on terrifically titled tracks like “A Girl Called Destruction,” “The Only Colour in the World is Love” and “She’s Got Diamonds in Her Hair.” The band’s other 1987 album, The Girl Who Runs the Beat Hotel, is worth checking out too and contains the band’s best-ever single, the Andrew Innes-sung “Someone Stole My Wheels.”

20. Various Artists – Creation Soup Vol 1-5 (1990)

Most people associate Creation Records with their ’90s heyday of Oasis, Primal Scream, Ride, Super Furry Animals and My Bloody Valentine, but the label’s first five years were full of singles from jangly, ’60s-inspired bands who most people have probably never heard of, most of which were only released on 7″. In 1990 Creation gathered them all up for a five volume CD set. McGee notes that “The first twenty came in hand folded sleeves which Joe Foster and I used to stay up and fold all night four or five times a week.” They include great early singles by Primal Scream, Felt, The Loft, The Weather Prophets, The Jasmine Minks, The Pastels, House of Love, Biff Bang Pow!, The Bodines, and more. Noticeably absent from these, though, is the label’s breakthrough — The Jesus & Mary Chain’s 1984 debut single “Upside Down” (due to rights issues). Creation Soup is still a fascinating look at the formative years of a label that would become an indie powerhouse.

19. The Jesus & Mary Chain – Munki (1998)

The Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1984 debut single, “Upside Down,” turned the UK indie scene upside down with its then-novel approach of taking a Phil Spector-eque pop song and wrapping it in pummeling noise and feedback. It also put Creation Records on the map, paving the way for House of Love, My Bloody Valentine, Ride and many more of the label’s most famous groups. JAMC made the leap to Warner Bros immediately after this single but Creation founder Alan McGee stayed the band’s manager, and JAMC quickly became alt-rock stars. By the late-’90s, though, Jim and William Reid felt chewed up and spit out by the music industry and weren’t getting along with each other so well, either. If Warner had lost interest in the band after five albums, McGee had not, and welcomed the Reids back to Creation with open arms. Bookended by the supercatchy “I Love Rock N’ Roll” and tinnitus-inducing “I Hate Rock N’ Roll,” the sprawling, 17-track Munki plays like a career retrospective, including buzzsaw pop, semi-acoustic numbers, duets with Hope Sandoval, and dissonant noise jams. Munki served as a great final word on the JAMC…till they reformed and made a new album 19 years later.

18. The Loft – One Round the Fair (1989) / The Weather Prophets – Diesel River (1988)

You can’t really tell the story of Creation Records without including Peter Astor, the label’s first shining star, who wrote charming, literate songs with his Television/VU-esque bands The Loft and The Weather Prophets. (The Loft’s original name was The Living Room, which was also the name of Alan McGee’s pre-Creation London club night; Astor changed it to avoid confusion.) Astor also had a face meant for magazine covers, as well as a fine if not exceptional Tom Verlaine-esque voice that probably kept his groups from crossing over into more mainstream success. Not that Creation Records’ Alan McGee didn’t try. The Loft broke up before making a full length record but their excellent singles “Why Does the Rain” (which Astor recorded with The Weather Prophets, too) and “Up the Hill and Down the Slope” are among Creation’s best early singles and, along with the b-sides, make up compilation Once Round The Fair. Astor and Loft bandmate Dave Morgan formed The Weather Prophets who continued in much the same direction, releasing three albums that never quite captured the magic of the band’s Creation singles, most of which are collected on Diesel River (though your best bet is 2004 best-of comp Blue Skies & Free-Rides).

17. Adorable – Against Perfection (1993)

Making their debut with the undeniable “Sunshine Smile,” Adorable were initially lumped in with the shoegaze scene, because almost everything on Creation in 1992 was kinda shoegaze, but the band were closer in spirit to House of Love’s textured, romantic pop than My Bloody Valentine or Swervedriver. They owed a lot to the Pixies and The Wedding Present, too, held Echo & The Bunnymen in the highest regard, and Fijalkowski had no shortage of big hooks and mile-wide choruses in his arsenal. Their debut album, Against Perfection, is one of the great, underrated UK indie records of the early ’90s, jam-packed with memorable melodies, roaring/chiming guitars, clever/heartfelt lyrics and lots of swagger. The American release, via SBK records, betters the UK version by adding “Sunshine Smile” and another early single, “I’ll Be Your Saint,” alongside killer album cuts like “A to Fade In,” “Homeboy,” “Favorite Fallen Idol” and “Still Life.”

16. The Jazz Butcher – Fishcotheque (1988)

With the Jazz Butcher’s mid-’80s albums for Glass Records, which featured a band that included bassist (and ex Bauhaus member) David J, The Jazz Butcher (Pat Fish) had gained the reputation for whimsical indie a la Robyn Hitchcock. Signing to Creation, Pat started a new version of the group with collaborator Kizzy O’Callahan, intent on changing his image. That makeover began with 1988’s Fishcotheque, one of his best albums that showed a new, more serious side to The Jazz Butcher. “I was keen to get as far away from all those ‘w, words that had followed my group around,” Fish wrote later of the album, “to make it as clear as I could that this was a rock & roll thing, not some ‘eccentricity.’ I had my shades and I had my fringed suede jacket and I had the Weather Prophets rhythm section.” Witty without being wacky, Fishcotheque is loaded with great songs, including the punky “Looking for Lot 49,” the wistful “Swell” and “The Next Move Sideways,” terrific pop number “Let’s Get it Wrong,” and one of his best-ever songs, “Susie,” which features Sonic Boom on feedback. Pat didn’t entirely abandon his “w” side, though, which rears its head on “Living in a Village” and vegan rap song “The Best Way” (which isn’t as kooky as it may seem).

15. Momus – The Tender Pervert (1988)

Named after the Greek god of satire and mockery, Momus (aka Scottish artist Nic Currie) was Creation’s most idiosyncratic artist on record*, writing almost exclusively about sex and death but in a high-minded style that was likely to quote the bible or ancient literature, and playing in a style somewhere between Donovan and Jacques Brel. (Most eccentric in real life: Felt’s Lawrence.) As the ’80s went on, Currie would incorporate Pet Shop Boys-style synthpop into the Momus sound. The Tender Pervert was his first real flirtation with drum machines, and was a deeply twisted, angry record fueled by disgust with Margaret Thatcher’s response to the AIDS crisis. “I’m so furious about this that I decide that, if gay people are not only dying but being gagged by the government while dying, it’s up to straight people to promote homosexuality in their place,” Currie wrote reflecting on the record. Momus is at the height of his witty, erudite powers here on tracks like “The Angels Are Voyeurs,” “The Homosexual,” “A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)” and the elegant, complex “Bishonen.” Currie is not wrong when he writes that The Tender Pervert is “my best and most definitive album” — it’s also the best place to start for this artist who is definitely an acquired taste.

14. Swervedriver – Ejector Seat Reservation (1995)

Swervedriver were one of the best groups of the original shoegaze era, but by 1995 interest in the genre in their home country (and label, Creation) had fully moved on to Britpop. Unlike some bands (Ride, Lush), Swervedriver stuck to their guitar pedals while trying to expand upon their sound with their third album, Ejector Seat Reservation. It was still heavy, but there was an equal emphasis on melody and maelstrom, adding elements of Bowie and Bolan to the mix, not to mention a string and horn section. It’s Swervedriver’s best album and loaded with memorable songs, including pile-driver “Bring Me the Head of the Fortune Teller,” the poppy/heavy “The Other Jesus,” elegant first single “Last Day on Earth,” and soaring closing cut “To the Birds.” Unfortunately there was no time to celebrate: Creation Records dropped Swervedriver the week after Ejector Seat Reservation was released and deleted the album from their catalog, making it for years the band’s hardest-to-find album.

13. Saint Etienne – Good Humor (1997)

Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs formed Saint Etienne in 1990 as a way to mix their obsession with ’60s and ’70s pop, R&B, soul and reggae with the indie dance and rave culture that had taken over the UK at the time. They originally envisioned the group as having a different vocalist for every single, but that changed when they met Sarah Cracknell, and Saint Etienne became a trio. After three albums of sample-based dance pop, Saint Etienne changed course, and decamped to Malmo, Sweden to make a full-band album with Cardigans producer Tore Johannsen at his famed Tambourine Studios. Armed with a group of crack session musicians, Good Humor is unlike any other record in Saint Etienne’s catalog before or since, working in elements of exotica, acid jazz and Beach Boys/Phil Spector wall of sound pop. While Saint Etienne’s previous albums had been released by Heavenly Recordings through Creation, Good Humor was the first — and last — to be released by Creation proper. Singles “Sylvie” and “The Bad Photographer” were both Top 30 UK hits and Good Humor remains Saint Etienne’s biggest seller in the US (where it was released by Sub Pop).

12. The Boo Radleys – Giant Steps (1993)

Liverpool band The Boo Radleys began as one of the noisiest of the ’90s shoegazers, with some songs on their 1991 Creation debut, Everything’s Alright Forever, sounding like a garbage truck in a rockslide. But deep down, guitarist Martin Carr was a lover of the classics — The Beatles, Kinks and other late-’60s psychedelic pop — and that side of him was ready to emerge. The watershed moment was the title track of 1992’s Lazarus EP which took a roaring, anthemic melody and built it up slowly with an extended, dubbed-out intro. It’s one of their best-ever tracks. “Lazarus” turned out to be the first taste of what would be their magnum opus — the boundary pushing, Coltrane-referencing, appropriately named third album, Giant Steps. Noise and hazy effects still rang through songs like “I Hang Suspended,” “Butterfly McQueen,” “Rodney King – Song for Lenny Bruce” and “Take the Time Around,” but nothing was obscuring the massive hooks Carr loaded the songs with. There were also just straight-up pop songs like “Wishin’ I Was Skinny,” “Barney and Me,” and “If You Want it, Take It.” It’s a record that, in its own way, is every bit as ambitious as Screamadelica or Loveless, and one that opened Creation’s door for Britpop’s coming surge. “I felt that everything was moving towards this big pop thing,” Carr says in David Cavanagh’s The Creation Records Story. “Loads of bands — young bands with guitars — were getting into the charts. Blur were getting there. Suede were having hits. We didn’t sell that many records with Giant Steps but everyone was dying to see what we were going to do next.” Next would net them a massive UK hit single — 1995’s “Wake Up Boo!” — but Giant Steps is still their finest hour.

11. Super Furry Animals – Radiator (1997)

Oasis may have been Creation’s biggest selling act of the ’90s (by a mile) but, pound for pound, Super Furry Animals were probably the best. The band were proudly Welsh, not afraid to sing in their native tongue, and wildly creative, with a wide anarchic streak. Their terrific 1996 debut album, Fuzzy Logic, paid tribute to Welsh drug smuggler (and national hero) Howard Marks both on the cover art and on song “Hanging With Howard Marks,” and the same year they released single “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” which sampled Steely Dan and held the record, at 50 utterances, for most “fucks” given in a song (till Insane Clown Posse’s “Fuck the World” beat it in 1999). Just a year later, SFA were back with Radiator, a record that was leaps and bounds better than their debut, and where they went from being a lot of fun to one of the more consistently great, wildly creative bands of the era. (They still are.) Radiator incorporates Madchester-y shuffle (“Play it Cool,” “The Placid Casual”), Bowie-style spacerock (“Demons,” “Bass tuned to DEAD”), punk, and mutant pop (“Herman Loves Pauline”) into a style that became distinctly their own.

10. Slowdive – Souvlaki (1993)

Influenced by the Cocteau Twins‘ ethereal style, not to mention The Jesus and Mary Chain and probably a fair amount of goth, Pink Floyd and prog, Slowdive didn’t really sound like any other group from the original shoegaze era, riding a massive wave of shimmering guitars that were at times so transformed by effects pedals, they resembled synthesizers. Like their early EPs, the band’s debut album, Just for a Day, was hypnotic and sensuous, wrapping listeners in layer upon layer of gorgeous haze, but it was maybe a little lacking in focus and A-level material. Not a problem with their sophomore album that nestles memorable songs and a stronger rhythmic backbone into their signature aural cloudwork. Their best album to date, Souvlaki features some of their catchiest songs (“Alison,” “When the Sun Hits,” “40 Days”) with muscular material like “Machine Gun,” vivid trip-out “Yellow Melon” and two songs ( “Sing,” “Here She Comes”) featuring keyboards and treatments by Brian Eno. Best of all, though, is “Souvlaki Space Station” which takes their spiraling sound deep into dub territory. Never as popular at the time as their shoegaze contemporaries Ride or Lush, Slowdive’s records have aged better than most things from the ’90s, and the group have led one of the most satisfying second acts in recent memory.

9. Teenage Fanclub – Grand Prix (1995)

Teenage Fanclub’s third album, Bandwagonesque, is one of the three pillars in Creation’s 1991 crown (the other two are slightly higher up on this list), and an album that, along with Ride’s Nowhere, helped the label realize its place as a home for classic guitar pop done in new and exciting ways, or at least by new and exciting groups. What Teenage Fanclub did wasn’t exactly new — they drank deep from the well of Big Star and Dinosaur Jr. — but they did it very well and had three three talented singer-songwriters who had yet to reach their creative potential. That hit with 1995’s Grand Prix that, to carry on the Formula One racing theme, had Norman Blake, Gerrard Love and Raymond McGinley firing on all cylinders, with such instant earworms as “Sparky’s Dream,” “Neil Jung,” “Mellow Doubt,” “Verisimilitude,” and “Don’t Look Back.” The album was also released at the height of Britpop and pulled the Fannies into that orbit, even though they were never really part of that scene. While they may not equal Oasis in the ambition and swagger department, Grand Prix delivers just as many classics as (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, just in a more humble way.

8. Sugar – Copper Blue (1992)

Spoiler alert: this is the only American-made album on this list. Creation did release a few records by U.S. acts (Medicine, Guided by Voices, The Cramps) but not many, and most were more licensing deals than actual signings. But Bob Mould put together separate deals with Creation in the UK and Rykodisc in North America for his new band Sugar who rivaled MBV for being loudest-ever group on the label. With their roaring, punk-injected guitar pop sound, the trio (Mould, bassist David Barbe and drummer Malcolm Travis) were definitely a more natural fit with a label of noisemakers like Creation than Rykodisc (who were mainly known for being the first CD-only label). In any case, Sugar’s classic debut album is one of 1992’s best, and one of the greatest albums Creation Records released, with Mould’s signature mix of rippers (“Changes,” “A Good Idea”) and pop songs (“Helpless,” “If I Can’t Change Your Mind”) and even a little prog (“Hoover Dam”). Copper Blue was actually more of a hit across the pond first, reaching #10 in the UK album charts and with NME naming it the Best Album of 1992; the record really caught on with American alt-rock radio and MTV in 1993. Sugar burned bright and hot, releasing Beaster a mere six months later, yet flamed out during sessions for their second album. Still, Copper Blue remains one of Mould’s best collection of songs.

7. Felt – Forever Breathes the Lonely Word (1986)

Led by the decidedly eccentric but frequently brilliant Lawrence Hayward who was prone to 2 AM vacuuming and still only goes by his first name, Felt set out to release 10 albums and 10 singles in 10 years — “In and out in a decade,” he put it. He accomplished his goal, making crystalline guitar pop that owed much to Tom Verlaine (and just a little to Bob Dylan) with two sharply defined eras of the band. Felt’s first four albums were on Cherry Red and featured guitarist Maurice Deebank’s distinctive arpeggiated guitar style; the second began with the group’s move to Creation, with Deebank out and keyboardist Martin Duffy in, adding wonderful, rich organ to the band’s sound. Forever Breathes the Lonely Word was Felt’s first album for Creation and is Felt’s masterwork, with shimmering production, Lawrence at his most lyrically romantic, and Duffy’s brilliant playing all over it. It’s just great song after great song, including “Rain of Crystal Spires,” “Down But Not Out,” “All The People I Like And Those That Are Dead,” and “A Wave Crashed on the Rocks,” being particular highlights. Creation’s first great album.

6. Ride – Nowhere (1990)

Oxford’s Ride released their debut album in 1990 and perfectly split Creation Records’ two decades in existence down the middle. The band were clearly a product of the student indie scene that Creation was at the center of, owing much to House of Love, My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus & Mary Chain and early Primal Scream, but they were a half step generation younger, savvy, and ambitious. You could easily imagine songs like “Seagull” and “Kaleidoscope” being released with thinner production by the label just a couple years earlier, but Ride were not a group who just wanted to play to 150 people the rest of their lives. While undeniably part of the psychedelic shoegaze scene — they remain of the genre’s most iconic bands — Andy Bell and Mark Gardner were great songwriters, too, and underneath Nowhere‘s beautiful murk, haze and feedback is some serious musicianship and craft. Nowhere owes as much to The Byrds as it does MBV and is loaded with great tunes, as can be heard on the undeniable classic “Vapour Trail” — perhaps the greatest song to come out on Creation Records and not get released as a single. Ride would get more ambitious (and pop-savvy) on 1992’s excellent Going Blank Again, and would make a grab for the Britpop ring on 1994’s Carnival of Light, but Nowhere is the sound of a scene and a label at the dawn of the ’90s.

5. House of Love – House of Love (1988)

While The Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Upside Down” put Creation Records on the map, The House of Love’s debut album was the first album released by the label that really registered shockwaves beyond the indie charts. Led by Guy Chadwick, whose deep voice matched his high cheekbones, House of Love had some of JAMC’s squall but fed it through Chadwick’s graceful songwriting and guitarist Terry Bickers’ inventive playing. Opening salvo “Christine” is such a stunner, from the roaring guitars to the “Bah bah be dah dah” hook, if the rest of the album had been a dud it still might’ve made this list. But House of Love is all hits, from the dark, sexy cool of “Road” and “Hope” to the riff-heavy “Sulfur” and “Salome” to the ethereal grandeur of “Man to Child,” and the album’s second best song, “Love in a Car.” The album was also as big an influence on the burgeoning shoegaze scene as My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything, and it’s hard to imagine groups like Ride and Catherine Wheel existing without House of Love.

4. Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)

As Andy Bell of Ride, who would end up joining Oasis by the end of the ’90s, told us, Oasis “were the band Creation had been waiting for, and I think the label was also exactly what the band needed.” Oasis fit Creation head Alan McGee’s rock n’ roll ethos, ticking every box possible with a cup-runneth-over mix of attitude, razor-sharp wit, hedonistic joie-de-vivre and arrogance. It might’ve all been too much if Noel Gallagher wasn’t a one-man hit factory, losing songs in the couch that were better than many bands wrote in their whole career. They were definitely the guitar band McGee had always wanted, turning out singles like his ’60s and ’70s heroes, but putting a fresh face on them just in time to lead in the new Britpop movement that pushed grunge out of the country much like the USA had done to the King’s army some 200+ years before. While 1994’s Definitely Maybe was a fantastic debut, Oasis managed to follow it up just a year later with an even better album, one of the best of 1995 and without a doubt the peak of Gallaghers’ powers. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? even managed to be a hit in America, something a British rock band hadn’t done in years. The album is filthy with classics, from singles like “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Champagne Supernova,” and “Roll With It” to deep cuts like “Cast No Shadow,” and “She’s Electric.” While Oasis stayed popular throughout their existence, creatively, it was diminishing returns after this — but in 1995 the band could do no wrong.

3. My Bloody Valentine – Isn’t Anything (1988)

If Loveless was the sound of “how’d they do that?,” Isn’t Anything was the sound of “I wanna do that!” It’s hard to imagine Ride, Swervedriver, The Boo Radleys or any of the rest of the soon-to-erupt shoegaze scene — or half the indie rock of the ’90s — happening the way it did without the visceral impact of My Bloody Valentine’s first album for Creation. Songs like “(When You Wake (You’re Still in a Dream,” “Feed Me With Your Kiss” and “Sueisfine” hit like a brick and sound like you’ve already been knocked senseless. Kevin Shield’s glide guitar sound — a unique mix of tuning and playing style — was mysterious, instantly distinctive and deceptively attainable. The band used less effects pedals than most people thought. “The sound is purely physical,” MBV Svengali Kevin Shields said at the time. “It’s movement, a manual moving of the string: the short travel of he Jazzmaster and Jaguar tremolo that gives it that characteristic sort of upwards drone to the chord.” My Bloody Valentine even managed to make acoustic guitars seem heavy (“Come Cupid”) and the band’s more ethereal tracks like “Lose My Breath” were aptly named. The album has a reputation for thin, tinny sonics, but Kevin Shields’ all-analog 2018 remastered edition really shows what a gorgeous monster it is.

2. My Bloody Valentine – Loveless (1991)

A record so monumentally important to popular music it’s all but impossible to overstate its importance, Loveless is a bonafide classic. It’s also a record that took forever and somewhere around £250,000 to complete, that nearly bankrupted Creation, forcing the label to drop the band shortly after Loveless‘ release, and sell 49% of its stake to Sony Music. (“Overdue” and “over budget,” meanwhile, are words associated with the band to this day.) Even though countless artists have stolen from Kevin Shields’ signature “glide guitar” style, what the band get from their instruments on Loveless still sounds like nothing else. The four dry snare hits that open the album do not prepare you for the sludgy, white-dwarf heavy riff of opener “Only Shallow,” or when the song shifts into pure beauty and back again. Moments like that happen throughout Loveless, from the ethereal slipstream of “To Here Knows When” to the poppy indie rock of “When You Sleep,” to the dreamy, danceable perfection of “Soon.” So many rock critic cliches and adjectives were created — and wore out their welcome — with folks trying to describe Loveless, yet you can’t not be in awe 30 years on. It nearly destroyed the label but has always stood as one of its finest moments.

1. Primal Scream – Screamadelica (1991)

Led by gangly, cocksure Bobby Gillespie (who was The Jesus & Mary Chain’s original drummer and grew up with Creation boss Alan McGee), Primal Scream were Creation Records’ longest-running band, having released their debut single, “All Fall Down” on the label in 1985, and XTRMNTR in 2000, the last album released by the label before it dissolved. Like McGee, Gillespie seemed to live and breathe rock n’ roll and he and his bandmates, including the invaluable Andrew Innes, at times managed to stay cool purely on attitude while releasing less-than-stellar early records. Things for them changed, though, when they gave their lackluster, Stonesy single “I’m Losing More Than I Ever Had” to DJ Andrew Weatherall to remix. He took out almost all the vocals, threw a beat under it and added a sample of Peter Fonda From The Wild Angels yelling “We wanna be free to do what we wanna do! We wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time!” Released in February 1990, “Loaded” was one of the cornerstones of the acid house/Madchester scene and forever changed Primal Scream’s trajectory. They spent nearly two years on one continuous party, working with Weatherall, Jah Wobble, Stones producer Jimmy Miller — whatever suited their fancy and vibe — and releasing singles along the way which would eventually be collected as the era-defining Screamadelica. It shouldn’t have worked, but that sense of freedom made it come together beautifully. “Instead of having two guitars, bass, drums, vocals… we destroyed that,” Gillespie said in The Creation Records Story. “It was anything goes – synth, tabla, drum machine, no vocals, instrumentals, gospel singers, sitars. The whole range of anything goes noises and suddenly the band were freed. It was a much looser approach to making music. And then getting people like Andy and Hugo, and Alex Patterson and Thrash from The Orb, Jimmy Miller, Wobble, you know – these people, Messing with our music, taking it somewhere else, making it more interstellar, as far out as… It was incredible. The greatest time.” You still feel that listening to Screamadelica, too.

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