How It Feels to Be Something On by Sunny Day Real Estate

Sunny Day Real Estate had already fallen apart once, right after making LP2, with William Goldsmith and Nate Mendel heading off to Foo Fighters and Jeremy Enigk going solo. When the Seattle band regrouped in 1997, Mendel stayed where he was, and How It Feels to Be Something On, out on Sub Pop on September 8, 1998, was the first album of the new era: Enigk singing and playing guitar, Dan Hoerner on guitar and Goldsmith back behind the kit.

It's slower, stranger and more spacious than anything the emo scene they'd helped kick-start might have expected, Enigk's keening voice floating over guitars that chime and swell rather than simply thrash. "Pillars" is the song that lingered. The comeback was brief: The Rising Tide followed, and by 2001 they'd split again. But Sub Pop's 2016 reissue stirred up fresh interest, including a new Pitchfork review, and sent the record to number 7 on Billboard's Vinyl Albums chart.

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