University by Throwing Muses

University, the sixth Throwing Muses album, landed in January 1995 with Tanya Donelly long gone and Kristin Hersh running the show, David Narcizo still on drums and Bernard Georges on bass. It came out through 4AD and Sire, and it carried "Bright Yellow Gun", a jittery, hook-sharp single that finally gave the band a national hit in America.

Hersh's songs still twist and swerve, all odd tempos, strange chord changes and surreal imagery, and Narcizo still drums around the cymbals instead of crashing through them, but the guitars bite hard and the choruses land clean. In Britain it climbed to number 10 on the albums chart. Back home it didn't sell enough to satisfy Sire, which dropped the band, and that closed the book on the Muses' major-label years.

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