We all know that nostalgia is a hell of a drug, especially as we get older. In our progression towards succumbing to death, we constantly look backwards, finding comfort and solace in the past. Most of the time, we fail to interrogate that past, choosing instead to look at it through rose colored glasses, hoping to recapture some long lost reality that, in all actuality, never really existed in the first place. Music plays a central role in connecting us with these moments transporting us backwards in time to feelings we experienced for the first time and to moments that remain etched, in some form, in our consciousness. For me, 1994–1996, those high school years, formed much of my musical taste, and looking back thirty years later, I’m amazed at home influential 1995 actually was in regard to my formation.

A lot of people look back to 1994 as a pivotal year in regard to album releases with Soundgarden’s Superunknown, Green Day’s Dookie, Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple, Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, and a slew of other albums, including Beastie Boy’s Ill Communication, Nas’ Illmatic, Dinosaur Jr.’s Without a Sound and Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, debuting. Yet, the more I look at the albums that came out in 1995, the more I realize how influential that year actually became for me. Granted, that was the year that straddled my junior and senior years of high school, a period when most of us form our musical tastes that will carry over into the rest of our lives. That year saw albums from Green Day, Sunny Day Real Estate, The Smashing Pumpkins, Hum, MXPX, Rancid, NOFX, Radiohead, Foo Fighters, Silverchair, Hayden, Mudhoney, Sleater Kinney, Blink 182, and on and on and on.

I won’t say that each of these albums or bands have remained with me over the years, but I will say that each of them, in their own way, made an impact. Specifically, I remember picking up The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a two-disc opus that includes “Tonight, Tonight,” “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” and “Stumbleine.” I recall putting that album into the Discman, which was of course attached to my car stereo through the tape deck, and driving around Betty Virginia Park, going to the coffee house, and wasting the nights away. I remember repeatedly listening to NOFX’s I Heard They Suck Live, quoting the stage banter between the band ad nauseum with high school friends. Even though they came out in the early 1980s, I remember discovering The Specials during that period, while drinking five-dollar milkshakes at the coffee shop.

My tastes during that period centered on grunge, punk, indie, and a smattering of other genres. Rancid’s . . . And Out Come the Wolves landed, literally, like a time bomb with songs like “Olympia WA” and “Journey to the End of the East Bay” making me think about my own life during that moment, trying to start a band and make something happen with music. That album remains, to this day, one my go too records from that period because it does more that just capture a moment for me. It captures an awakening in so many ways, leading me further down the punk rabbit hole and expanding the tendrils to ska. Even though it is not an overtly political album like other punk albums, it embodies the ways that punk examines and critiques systems of power with songs like “As Wicked.”

While Rancid serves, for me, as a foundational band, another one of those bands, on the opposite side of the spectrum, is Radiohead. Following the release of their debut album Pablo Honey in 1993, and the success of its lead single “Creep,” Radiohead dropped their sophomore album The Bends in 1995. I know I listened to The Bends a lot that year, with songs like “Fake Plastic Trees,” “Just,” and “High and Dry” on regular rotation, but for me, I didn’t really appreciate the album till later, when I came to fully embrace Radiohead after the release of Kid A in 2000. Initially listening to it, it doesn’t sound like too huge of a leap from Pablo Honey, but on closer inspection, with songs like “Planet Telex” and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”, you can hear what they became on OK Computer and beyond. I rarely, if ever, return to Pablo Honey, but I do return again and again to The Bends because of its atmospheric, melancholy feel that takes me back to those crisp and cold fall and winter days in high school and college.

During that period, I would discover bands not through going to the mall and the corporate music store like Sam Goody or some other entity. Rather, I would watch MTV’s 120 Minutes every week and sometimes things like Headbanger’s Ball. The former introduced me to Sunny Day Real Estate in 1994 with their video for “In Circles” off of 1994’s Diary. Following the success of Diary, and other factors, Sunny Day Real Estate decided to call it quits, but they already had stuff recorded and had to meet the obligations of their contract with Sub Pop. As a result, they threw the album together, and as Jeremy Enigk said in 2008, “On a lot of songs, there aren’t lyrics! In a lot of cases, we never sat down to write them, because we just wanted to get it out of the way as fast as possible. So I just sang a lot of gibberish, which makes it really quirky.”

Even with the thrown-together nature of the album, LP2 holds a special place in my heart. It has a rawness and a beauty that anticipates Mineral’s 1996 debut The Power of Failing. It reminds me, as well, of Sigur Rós, whose songs appear in Hopelandic, a language that the band created, pulling from Icelandic. They seek for the listener to interpret the lyrics in their own manner, and this is how I feel with LP2. Songs like “Iscarabaid,” with its ethereal vocals weaving together, or “5/4” with its worship like lyrics, keep bringing me back. Plus, the closer, “Rodeo Jones” is simply a classic, pulling together everything that makes Sunny Day Real Estate the band that hooked me with Diary.

Watching 120 Minutes, I also discovered the Canadian songwriter Hayden in 1995 when I saw the video for his single “Bad As They Seem” off of his debut album Everything I Long For. Hayden, from the moment I heard his cough then strum on “Bad As They Seem” sunk his teeth into my adolescent psyche. His sound, the stripped down, detuned acoustic guitar, and his gravely voice, scratched the auditory itch, showing me the beauty in non-electric composition. Coupled with the instrumentation, his lyrics hit me because they spoke to that typical teenage yearning for independence and first love, especially in songs like “Stem” and “We Don’t Mind,” the latter of which brings back days of carefree love where all that mattered was each other. Yet, he also peppered the album with tracks like “When This Is Over,” a song from a young boy’s perspective as a mother drives him and his brother into the water and kills them. Inspired, possibly, by Susan Smith in South Carolina who killed her sons and claimed a Black man abducted them, it moves between soft, droning sections to guttural screams of agony.

This post merely scrapes the surface of the albums from 1995 that impacted me. I thought I could write about it all in one post, but as I progressed, I realize this warrants at least two posts. So, stay tuned for the next post where I look at some more influential albums from 1995. Until then, though, what are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.