Peppermint EP by Sloan

Peppermint, Sloan's debut EP, came out in 1992 on Murderecords, the Halifax band's own label, and it was cut close to home at Sound Market Studios with Terry Pulliam recording and engineering. Chris Murphy, Jay Ferguson, Patrick Pentland and Andrew Scott split the songwriting and the singing between them, and you can hear four sets of pop instincts jostling inside a haze of fuzzy guitar.

"Underwhelmed" is the one that got out into the world, and it has hung around the countdowns for years; the band re-recorded it for their first full-length, Smeared, which also took remixed versions of "Marcus Said" and "Sugartune". Jennifer Pierce of Jale adds backing vocals to "Marcus Said" and "Torn". The man on the cover is Jason Larsen, the friend the band is named after: his French-speaking boss called him "Slow One", which in that accent came out as "Sloan", and his price for the name was the cover shot.

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