1990s

When Numero began its quest of reissuing Karate’s discography back in 2021, their decade-plus run of records had been sitting in out-of-print limbo for twelve years, gradually g...

Post-rock emerged in an era retroactively plagued by and in defiance of its own many musical prefixes and afterthoughts, where genres could be insults as much as categorical dev...

If you can deactivate the now-calcified preconceptions of ’90s nostalgia and push beyond the ear-perking noisy hooks that register at first as standard shoegaze moves, and get c...

Being a teenager in the American suburbs of the 1980s and ‘90s often meant that your ideals seemed to outpace your surroundings. By the early 1990s, as a generation came of age ...

“We were all so young. This was really the first time that we were on our own without adults. There was this sense of our first real freedom.”—Craig Erickson

By 1997, emo was in the early throes of its first evolution since erupting out of the D.C. hardcore scene a dozen years earlier. This new wave was less concerned with its post-h...

Ohio’s Oberlin College has been a breeding ground for the struggling artist set since its 1833 founding. Poets, playwrights, authors, screenwriters, and musicians have tossed Ob...

The White Birch, ca. 1899 Stephen Immerwahr: I first saw Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s The White Birch in 1990 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and loved it immediately. The two femal...

Bedhead began with two brothers—the Kadanes. Bubba two years older than Matt, they were from Wichita Falls, a small city in Texas about 120 miles northwest of Dallas. The town o...

Run out of a former aerobics studio, Tim Jackson and Carolyn Schmitt’s Adult Crash clothing and record boutique was the first shop I ever visited when I washed up in Manhattan i...

At the end of the Future of What tour, in May 1995, each member of Unwound went home with a $1,500 profit share. The deal Unwound signed with BMG a mere three months later, by c...

During the Brandt years, Vern had typically been a silent partner. “My job back then was the van,” he said. “Making sure we could get from point A to point B.” Booking tours, de...

One night I was sitting with a friend in an alley outside a show. He told me that he had quit his band that day. My friend Brandt had been the drummer for what was probably my f...

For Unwound, the process was this: meet other freaks at school and become friends; practice relentlessly; perform with energy and volume; tour and make records. But I think Unwo...

It was three days from Austin, Texas, to Olympia, Washington, by Greyhound, and what Sean McManus remembered best about the journey, which he embarked upon with his roommate in ...

Issued quietly in the dead of 1991 on compact disc, Windows and Light is Suse Milleman’s only album. The synthetic, balearic album “came out of living the experience of having a...