Down on the Upside by Soundgarden

Down on the Upside, Soundgarden's fifth album, came out on A&M on May 21, 1996, after the band had spent a long stretch touring the world behind Superunknown. They produced it themselves, and the result is lighter and less oppressive than anything they'd done before: Chris Cornell, Kim Thayil, Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron trying out new sounds and textures instead of just piling on the sludge.

"Pretty Noose" wraps a wiry, woozy guitar hook around a menacing strut, "Burden in My Hand" is a dusty, loping stomp with a big, bruised chorus, and "Blow Up the Outside World" swings from a hushed, eerie crawl to a crushing roar. "Ty Cobb" was a single too, a blast of rowdy, breakneck fury. Cornell's voice, as ever, can go from a croon to a howl in the space of a line.

It topped the charts in Australia and New Zealand and debuted at number two in the US, and the band hit the road for the 1996 Lollapalooza tour and then another world tour. But tensions inside the band were building, and in April 1997 Soundgarden split. It stayed their last studio album until King Animal in 2012, a strange, restless farewell that sounds like a band pulling in several directions at once.

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