Last Splash by The Breeders

Last Splash, the Breeders' second album, arrived on August 30, 1993, and it's the record that turned Kim Deal's side project into her main gig. The Pixies bassist had started the band as a sideline; here, with Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs, Jim MacPherson and Carrie Bradley, she produced it herself, and it sounds like nobody else was allowed to tidy it up.

It's a gloriously lopsided thing: fuzzbox guitars that lurch in and out, lazy harmonies, a whiff of surf twang, and songs that stop and start on a whim. "Cannonball" is the calling card, with its distorted yelp and a bass line that bounces like a rubber ball, and the album takes its name from a line in it. "Divine Hammer" is pure bubblegum crunch, and "Saints" rides a sunny, summery groove. Spike Jonze and Kim Gordon directed the "Cannonball" video, and Jonze, Gordon and Richard Kern did "Divine Hammer".

It reached 33 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum by June 1994. Its reach went further than the charts: the Prodigy looped the guitar from "S.O.S." for their 1996 hit "Firestarter". In 2020 Rolling Stone put it at 293 on its list of the 500 greatest albums, and 4AD has since reissued it twice, in 2013 and again in 2023.

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