You’d Prefer an Astronaut by Hum

You'd Prefer an Astronaut, Hum's third album and their first for a major label, came out on RCA on April 11, 1995, and it sounds like a Champaign, Illinois, band trying to fire a rock riff into orbit. The band produced it themselves, and they stack the guitars into huge, humming walls, part post-hardcore crunch, part space-rock drift, with Matt Talbott's voice floating somewhere above the static and Bryan St. Pere hammering away underneath.

"Stars", the second single, was the one that broke through, a slow-building crush of distortion that climbed to number 11 on Billboard's modern rock chart and turned up on Beavis and Butt-Head. It carried the album past 250,000 sold, and a Cadillac ad with Kate Walsh brought it roaring back a decade later. "The Pod" and "I'd Like Your Hair Long", the song that handed the album its title, were the other singles.

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