Wishville by Catherine Wheel

Wishville, the fifth and final Catherine Wheel album, came out on Columbia in May 2000, and it's the sound of a band down a man and turning the amps up to compensate. Bassist Dave Hawes was fired before the sessions, making this the only Catherine Wheel record without him, and rather than fill the hole with shimmer the band leaned hard into guitar-driven hard rock.

That was the endpoint of a long drift. The Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft band had started out lumped in with the shoegazers and got more muscular as they went, and Wishville finishes the job: thick, chunky riffs, big choruses and very little of the old haze. "Sparks Are Gonna Fly", the album's only single, is the proof, a crunching rocker that still turns up on countdowns years after the band called it a day in 2000.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.