100% Fun by Matthew Sweet

100% Fun, Matthew Sweet's album for Zoo Entertainment, came out on March 14, 1995, with a title lifted, darkly, from Kurt Cobain's suicide note of the year before. Brendan O'Brien produced, and he gives Sweet's sugar-rush melodies a heavy, fuzzed-out shove, so the hooks land with a thud instead of a twinkle.

"Sick of Myself" is the one that stuck: buzzing, jittery and self-lacerating, with a chorus that snaps shut like a trap. It went to #2 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart, crossed onto the pop charts too, and later drew covers from Bowling for Soup and, for NPR's World Cafe in 2005, Death Cab for Cutie. The album did respectable business and won good reviews, and Entertainment Weekly's David Browne put it on his best-of-the-year list. It came four years after Girlfriend, the 1991 album that went gold, and in 2018 Intervention Records announced an expanded double-LP reissue.

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