Distant Plastic Trees by The Magnetic Fields

Distant Plastic Trees, the Magnetic Fields' 1991 debut, is Stephin Merritt's pocket symphony: tiny, deliberate and a little chilly to the touch. Merritt wrote and produced it, but he handed the lead vocals to Susan Anway, whose cool, clear voice floats over the machines like someone reading love letters aloud in an empty train station.

And it is machines. Merritt called the record "intentionally small" and pointed to Young Marble Giants, and the gear list backs him up: a Roland S-50 sampler, Korg Poly-800 and ARP Odyssey synths, a Yamaha RX-21 drum machine, with an acoustic guitar sneaking in only on "Plant White Roses". "Babies Falling" is a Wild Stares cover, and "100,000 Fireflies", the band's first single, is the sweetest ache here. It came out first in Japan and Britain before landing in America on the band's own PoPuP imprint; Merge later paired it with The Wayward Bus.

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