Gish by The Smashing Pumpkins

Gish, the debut album from the Smashing Pumpkins, came out on Caroline Records on May 28, 1991, and it announced a band that wanted to be louder, prettier and more cosmic than anyone else crawling out of the alternative underground. Butch Vig produced it with Billy Corgan, who has described it as a deeply spiritual album, a record about spiritual ascension, and you can hear it in the way the songs keep reaching for the sky.

Corgan and James Iha weave their electric guitars into swirling, psychedelic clouds and then slam them into hard-rock walls, D'Arcy Wretzky's bass anchors the drift, and Jimmy Chamberlin drums like a jazz player who got lost in a metal show. "Siva" is a snarling, heavy-lidded churn that suddenly opens into dreamy space; "Rhinoceros" drifts and builds until it roars, and "I Am One" charges out of the gate with a thunderous groove.

It started slow, peaking at just 195 on the Billboard 200, but critics fell for its psychedelic sound, and it eventually went platinum, one of the best-selling independent albums of its day. It has since been ranked among the best rock albums of the 1990s, and one critic went so far as to argue that Nevermind as we know it might not exist without it.

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