Under the Pink by Tori Amos

Under the Pink, the second album from Tori Amos, arrived on Atlantic in January 1994, and it's the record where the American singer-songwriter and pianist stopped sounding like a promising newcomer and started sounding like nobody else. She produced it herself, and you can tell: every choice feels like hers, from the spare arrangements to the way the piano does the heavy lifting that guitars did on everybody else's records that year.

These songs flutter and jab. One minute Amos is murmuring close to the microphone, the next she's hammering the keys and pushing her voice into a wild, keening upper register, and the melodies twist in directions you don't see coming. "Cornflake Girl" is the catchiest thing here, a rolling, skipping single that sent the album straight in at the top of the British chart. "God" is spikier and more restless, and "Past the Mission" and "Pretty Good Year" show how much tension she can pull out of a hush.

In America it peaked at number 12 but kept selling, going double platinum by 1999, and it has since turned up on lists of the greatest albums of the '90s. Fans in Australia and New Zealand got an extra helping that November: a double-disc tour edition called More Pink: The B-Sides.

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