Britpop reached its zenith in 1995, when just about every major player released a new album. It was also the time of the Blur Vs Oasis feud, mostly created by the music press but definitely egged on with headlinable quotes from Oasis’ Noel and Liam Gallagher and Blur’s Damon Albarn.

On August 14, 1995 both Blur and Oasis released new singles — “Country House” and “Roll With It” — as precursors to their respective new albums. It was dubbed the “Battle of Britpop,” which grew beyond hype-prone music weeklies and into the UK national news. Who would debut at #1?

1995 was also a year where some artists who were previously part of other genres (punk, shoegaze) jumped on the Cool Britannia bandwagon, and other artists who were never really part of the scene made a record that somehow aligned with the zeitgeist. It was all part of a Union Jack colored venn diagram.brooklynvegan

Super Furry Animals – God! Show Me Magic whips the eardrums like a punk tape playing in a wind tunnel apessimistisneverdisappointed

Pulp – Common People (Live from Glastonbury) The song is much more than the defining moment for Pulp—it’s the defining moment for Britpop. No other song captures the essence, the angst, the disenchantment, the panic of what the world had become as it approached a new century. And those feelings, like the movement itself, would eventually lead to a downward spiral of excess and self-indulgence, of caricature and corrosion. These feelings live on today despite the movement’s absence, but “Common People” is where they were most clearly articulated. pastemagazine

Black Grape – Reverend Black Grape a grimily cosmic musical jigsaw, melding rock, hip-hop, acid house, psychedelic pop and reggae with Ryder’s gutter poetry, delivered in his inimitable shyster’s bark. theguardian

Oasis – Acquiesce With hindsight, Noel’s insistence that Acquiesce should be the B-side of the inferior Some Might Say was an early sign of a hubris that would be Oasis’s artistic undoing. It’s a fantastic song, and the pleading tone of the chorus still makes it sound like a rather moving depiction of sibling relations, despite its author’s constant insistence that it isn’t. theguardian

Shack – Dragonfly one of those bands who seemed poised for stardom but just couldn’t catch a break or get out of their own way. Led by brothers Michael and John Head, who spent most of the ’80s in orchestral indie band The Pale Fountains, Shack updated the ’60s merseybeat sounds of their Liverpool hometown, which landed them sonically somewhere between The La’s and The Stone Roses. Recording of their second album took place in 1991, but went over schedule as Michael Head struggled to finish songs; when the album was finished, the studio burned down along with the album’s masters. The only finished copy of the record was in the possession of producer Chris Allison…who accidentally left the tape in a rental car. The DAT tape was eventually tracked down but by the time it was back in the hands of the group, their label had folded. Waterpistol finally saw release in 1995, by which time Shack had been broken up for a couple years already, with Michael Head falling into heroin addiction brooklynvegan

The Softies – I Love You More While the band’s work may not have made the widespread cultural impact or contained the genre innovations of a Radiohead or a Wilco, their songs contain levels of emotional depth and intimacy as timeless as truly heartfelt, well-crafted music can be. It has been said that music is universal, and while that statement so often hinges on ambiguous cultural contexts, if you’ve ever felt the rollercoaster of emotion that love always seems to inspire, The Softies could be the soundtrack to your most loneliest winter nights and happiest summer afternoons cokemachineglow

The Magnetic Fields – Smoke and Mirrors A demystification or demythologization of a relationship, “Smoke And Mirrors” conflates “love” with a cruel parlor trick, as Merritt dispiritedly croons “Special effects/ A little fear/ A little sex/ That’s all love is/ Behind the tears / Smoke and mirrors.” The backing vocals in French add a stark anomie to the song, suggesting just how detached and numb the protagonist has become to the relationship, reinforced by the denouement, “We put on a lovely show/ Now that’s all/ I had to go,” a line as devastating as Joy Division’s “Love will tear us apart … again.” stereogum

Blur – The Universal When Blur aims for loveliness, they have rarely failed, or even flailed: A nervy bunch of nervous guys, they still sound most at home when they’ve got a sweeping, lovely, orchestra-ready tune to unveil. This fitful band, who’ve always been happy with the money but fidget with their place in the cosmos, actually making something so universal? It really, really, really could happen spin

Menswe@r – Daydreamer Every genre seems to have its blatantly commercial group that pays close attention to the competition, trying to beat them at their own game while proclaiming what they really want to be is famous. Menswe@r were that band for Britpop, a group that felt like they were conceived in the pages of the hype-heavy British music press or at a scene-y Camden pub like The Good Mixer. In fact, the band’s Johnny Dean and Chris Gentry managed to get a quote about Menswe@r in an issue of Select when the band was just an idea in their head, and Melody Maker put them on the cover before they’d released a single. (MM did the same for Suede.) … Nuisance is enjoyable fluff and, unlike some groups, Menswe@r don’t attempt to hide what they’re doing. brooklynvegan

Radiohead – The Bends Nobody would call Radiohead Britpop now, and nobody really did in 1995 either, but The Bends definitely has more in common with Blur and Oasis than the proggy widescreen grandeur they would debut with OK Computer. These are pop songs played on guitars — lots of guitars — and tracks like “Fake Plastic Trees,” “High and Dry,” “Bones” and “The Bends” became the template for many new Britpop groups in the second half of the ’90s. (See: Travis, Stereophonics, Longpigs, Coldplay.) brooklynvegan

Aphex Twin – Ventolin an endurance test: how long can you stand the aggro-industrial thresher before you mistake the song’s tinnitus-tone for your own hearing loss? factmag

Yo La Tengo – Tom Courtenay uses ‘60s British acting royalty for the backdrop of a song about the deceptive glamour of fame (and the irresistible draw of stars’ private follies). Vocalist Ira Kaplan serves as a sympathetic narrator, as trembling, distortion-spackled guitars bend and hum underneath him while the “ba-ba-ba” counterpoint adds levity. spin

The Apples in Stereo – Tidal Wave the breakthrough release of the Elephant 6 collective, which alone is responsible for many of the better albums of the decade, Fun Trick Noisemaker is the album that defines the post-grunge indie pop shift from sullen negativity into a kind of cockeyed, giddy optimism, and is also among the handful of albums that turned Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee, and Burt Bacharach  into cool names to drop at the record store allmusic

The Verve – History such a sense of astounding self-belief that they can almost convince you that even their more nonsensical moments should be cast in gold, carved in stone and treated with the utmost artistic respect nme

Whipping Boy – When We Were Young inebriating nostalgia irishtimes

Supergrass – Alright A sunny sing-along song celebrating youth, “Alright” is bright and brief and brilliant. pastemagazine Being from the ’90s, of course, “Alright” was also fitted with a self-awareness and sense of doubt, singer Gaz Coombes crashing his new car and asking on the chorus “Are we like you? I can’t be sure,” but it’s tough for the piano-led jauntiness and clean-teethed enthusiasm not to win out.  spin

Sleeper – Inbetweener still regarded as something of an also-ran in the Britpop hierarchy. Shame, too, as tracks like this prove that singer/guitarist Louise Wener had a knack for earworm melodies and cheeky lyrics that reveal the dark, seamy thoughts hidden away by British suburb dwellers pastemagazine

Echobelly – King of the Kerb Echobelly was essentially the Britpop Blondie, and “King of the Kerb” is one of the band’s crowning achievements. On it, Sonya Madan and company tell stories of homelessness and prostitution over a deceptively cheery melody pastemagazine

Tullycraft – Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend’s Too Stupid To Know About made their mark with slogan-worthy ditties ravensingstheblues

Rocketship – I Love You Like The Way I Used to Do the type of slightly below-the-radar act that fans connect with in a fiercely personal way. In part this sense of intimacy probably stems from the Sacramento band’s connection with indie pop, which prizes community and handmade sweetness. pitchfork

Mercury Rev – Everlasting Arm when See You… is mentioned today it is usually as a link between the band’s earlier, wilder work and the melodic calm of Deserter’s Songs. The songs may not be quite up there with those on Deserter’s Songs (then again, what songs are?) and the band’s sound may be slightly more straight laced compared to (second album) Boces’ trombone weirdness. But few bands have ever achieved such a perfect mixture of off-key weirdness, cinematic range and perfect pop as Mercury Rev did on See You… musicmthought

Guided By Voices – Game of Pricks At his prime, it seemed like Guided by Voices mastermind Robert Pollard couldn’t touch a guitar pick without writing a new classic, and “Game of Pricks” flows forth as such, as if all he did was open his mouth for the melody to come out. The whole thing’s just over a minute and a half long, which means there’s no room for bullshit– just that indelible, brain-burned melody fed through shit-fi production and looped to infinity, as Pollard sings out like the stadium-playing superstar vet he should’ve been but never was. “You can never be strong/ You can only be free” goes one of “Game of Pricks”‘ most memorable couplets pitchfork

Foo Fighters – This Is A Call the track that would kick their entire career off… one of the few songs off Foo Fighters’ debut album that Grohl did not write during his time with Nirvana and therefore acts as a crystalline version of his vision for the band and its future faroutmagazine

The Flaming Lips – Psychiatric Explorations of the Foetus With Needles the Lips use distortion to exhilarate rather than annihilate: “Psychiatric Exploration of the Fetus With Needles” may rumble like a rocket launching out of your floor, but its perma-grin melody invites you along for the ride. pitchfork

The Flaming Lips – When You Smile transcendently beautiful and foreshadows their future pop brilliance undertheradarmag

Boards of Canada – Sixtyniner The prescient, beanie-nodding beats are present, too, hammering home a surprisingly sweet subliminal message about that infinite moment, the kiss pitchfork

Paul Weller – Broken Stones The Stanley Road album is named after the Woking street where Weller grew up, and this nostalgic song looks back at the changes that take place across a life, like pebbles tossed around on a beach. radiox

The Charlatans – Just When You’re Thinkin Things Over The Charlatans are survivors, having started as part of the Manchester music scene in the wake of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. But they have managed to change with the changing times, surviving a few major setbacks and tragedies, while maintaining their own identity and Hammond organ-led sound. As Madchester’s high faded, guitars began figuring in a little more prominently into their sound. While 1994’s Up to Our Hips stumbled, The Charlatans sorted themselves out by the time of their self-titled fourth album, which found them sounding more confident than ever, adopting a Stones-y Exile on Main Street vibe that put them right in heart of Britpop brooklynvegan

Cornershop – 6 a.m. Jullandar Shere The slightly commonplace, folksy melody suggests endless verses in Punjabi passed down from several generations prior to this sampladelic alt-rock reinvention. And Tjinder Singh’s distortion-treated vocal suggests the gauze of an answering machine, like he’s teaching it to us over the phone, with that tabla and matched rock drums coming in suspiciously clear. It feels like it can go on forever, and 20 years later, in a way it has spin

Teenage Fanclub – Verisimilitude the appearance of Grand Prix in May 1995 heralded a remarkably cleaner, more developed sound as well as a marked spike in overall songwriting standards. The melodies were more targeted, the vocal harmonies much enhanced. The sound they established on Grand Prix would largely define the rest of their career. They had found their place musicomh

McAlmont and Butler – Yes an affirmation writ large in a pop song, subverting the  classic ‘I Will Survive’, its about dusting yourself down after a soon to be ex-lover has kicked you in the guts. Thus it took on a knowing double meaning for the down on their luck pair, as McAlmont’s sky scraping vocals radiated an effortless soul, towering toward great heights. While Butler’s epic arrangements give Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ a lick of paint, grandly draping McAlmont’s notes in shimmering production. ‘Yes’ is wonderful, elevating and one of my singles of the 1990s godisinthetvzine

PJ Harvey – To Bring You My Love a powerful opening track that unfolds slowly over repetitions of a guitar riff as an eerie organ chills in the background. But it’s when Harvey invokes the title phrase over a pair of crashing, distorted chords that the thunder and lightning begin to strike. It’s Old Testament blues, delivered with requisite hellfire treblezine

Palace Music – New Partner “the loons on the moor” — that’s, like, the line that says, “OK, this song is about being a song,” because, you know, there aren’t loons on a moor. It’s taking two romantic images and throwing them together, by a computer, essentially. Just like, “Oh, if I take loons and moors, because those are evocative romantic notions that people might find in a song or a story, and just start throwing everything in there … it’s obvious that this is a romantic song.” But because there are no loons on any moor, immediately it’s like, well, this is not a real-world song. It’s a creation; it’s like a tribute to songs. Will Oldham in Rolling Stone

Ash – Girl From Mars 20 years later, it still sounds as dreamy and transportive as ever, even if we never did figure out what the hell Henri Winterman cigars  have to do with interplanetary young romance spin

Hum – Stars The flipside to “Girl From Mars,” Hum’s “Stars” is an equally spectral dream-pop crusher about a girl with a bad case of extraterrestrial envy spin

Gene – Olympian The Smiths were their ground zero. If seen from a certain angle, they could be perceived as a parody act. Sonic allusions run rampant on their debut, Olympian—Martin Rossiter sighs like Morrissey, “Haunted by You” opens with a ringing inversion of “This Charming Man”—but Gene also followed the Smiths’ blueprint more subtly, taking stills of films for their cover art and releasing their own Hatful of Hollow grab-bag of B-sides and live cuts the year after Olympian. All these Mancunian affectations from a group of Londoners are endearing because they’re not calculating; this is a band that felt the love so deeply, it infused every portion of their music. Olympian functioned as a slightly melancholic tonic to the arrogance sweeping Britpop during the spring of 1995. Certainly, Rossiter and his mates also had self-confidence—and they were tougher than the Smiths, showing some measure of debt to Suede’s gnarly glam noise revival—but the tenor of Olympian is strikingly different than, say, Definitely Maybe. If Oasis wanted to get out of that dirty bedroom, Gene was happy to dwell within it, wish the world would slow down, and wallow within their dashed dreams pitchfork

Ben Folds Five – Philosophy I really hate the lazy music journalist trope of “So and so is clearly in line to inherit so and so’s title as whatever.” But man, if anyone seemed poised to assume Billy Joel’s abdicated throne as America’s greatest piano tunesmith, it was Ben Folds Five. “Philosophy” is the equal of late ’70s Joel, with the raucous abandon of mid ’70s Elton John thrown in for good measure popdose

Sparklehorse – Someday I Will Treat You Good a tangled but sturdy song steeped in barnstorming twang and raucous rock & roll. More telling are Mark Linkous’ lyrical self-recriminations — “I left my baby on the side of the highway / She just couldn’t see things my way” — which sum up the song’s barely concealed loathing and frustration. spin

Elliott Smith – Needle in the Hay As devastating a two-string guitar wringing as you’ll ever hear, to accompany verses about heroin and fear and desperation and a four-word chorus that sounds like Elliott Smith crawling further and further underneath his bedsheets with every successive repetition spin

The Boo Radleys – Find The Answer Within resplendent with trumpets, a hook and a massive chorus thelineofbestfit

The Bluetones – Slight Return Britpop at its catchiest and most melodic. No lairiness or sexual undertones here, just a next level jangly pop tune featuring a video with some women running with prams and Bluetones singer Mark Morriss legging it down the street eating a sandwich. Utterly charming. nme

Helen Love – Beat Him Up 100 percent rinky-dink drum machine, cheap synth, and distorted guitar playing simple-as-pie punk-pop tunes ripped from the Ramones playbook. It shouldn’t work at all. It should sound silly and undernourished. It should flat out stink. Instead it is glorious allmusic

Harvey’s Rabbit – Is This What You Call Change? a rather wonderful version of a Robert Forster song nme

Baby Bird – Dead Bird Sings whatever ultra-naff low-fidelity keyboard tinklings he undertakes; he carries with him incredibly touching pieces like Dead Bird Sings that create, in the middle of this tank top of a record, an altogether different kind of sadness nme

Spritualized – Medication while utilizing a quiet/loud dynamic in 1995 wasn’t exactly revolutionary it succeeds as a marriage of the album’s two moods. After a brief, dissonantly waltzing intro the first thing you hear is Kate Radley’s two-note keyboard drone along with a soft, slowly throbbing tone (Radley is credited on the sleeve with all “tones, drones, tremeloes”). That tone, which will later occupy the whole of the title track, continually recurs throughout the record, often barely present behind the sound of the band and then moving into the forefront between songs as a brief pause. Having the same slow pulse underlie most of the music provides a unifying element that, whether because of the reticence of the drone or something more intrinsic to Pierce’s songwriting, never feels forced. stylusmagazine

Hole – Violet baits the ear with a jangling guitar tone cut from the same cloth as R.E.M., and then drummer Patty Schemel churns the song into a fury. “Go on, take everything/Take everything/I want you to,” howls Love, her bitterness oxidized into defiance pitchfork

Garbage – Vow features all the hallmarks that make a Shirley Manson and Co. song great: a glam-doom vocal performance unfettered by machine-shop sound effects, like the stereo panning that makes the verse riff spin around the room. Then it goes all minor before it goes all major, possibly with the most exultant melody of their career, to soundtrack a series of Manson threats: “I came to fuck you up,” “Break your soul apart.” But all this expertly Pro-Tooled industro-pop does is beckon you to play it again. spin

Luna – 23 Minutes in Brussels Has complicated love ever played out so uncomplicatedly? Dean Wareham’s laconic drawl musters up an epic concert-closer built around the refrain “Say a prayer / For you and me / Say a prayer / Tell me do you miss me,” while guitars (including that of Television’s fellow Velvet-jamming Tom Verlaine) coil and hover. Sighing has never felt more sexy. spin

The High Llamas – Checking In, Checking Out Sean O’Hagan has obviously done his Brian Wilson homework, listening to all the albums the Beach Boys recorded between Pet Sounds and Surf’s Up… an impressive outing that sounds like little else in the alternative rock world of the mid-’90s. But it only establishes O’Hagan and his various pals as charming emulators, rather than true innovators allmusic

Smog – Bathysphere Keyboards, chamberlin, and cello add a theatrical flair to Wild Love’s dark, witty portraits of domestic frustration allmusic

Tindersticks – Travelling Light signposted their plan to ditch the shabby whiskey saloon for the members’ bar – the artwork showed the band getting fitted for suits and the music leavened their darker, stickier deviances with orchestral arrangements that wouldn’t send Burt Bacharach running for his cocktail-stocked safe room. theguardian

Suede – New Generation When Brett Anderson hits the line, “It’s like a new generation calling / Can you hear it call?,” he does so with all the drama and conviction of an honest-to-goodness rallying cry signaling that Suede’s — and its generation’s — time had come. But by when the last single off Dog Man Star had been released, the Anderson-Butler era was long gone, with “New Generation” a nod to what once was rather than a new high water mark in a reign that should’ve lasted longer popmatters

The Smashing Pumpkins – Tonight, Tonight an orchestral swell that pulled back the curtain on the basic everything-ness of the album: It had wonder, and yearning, and sadness, and triumph, and mystery. Just how big could the Pumpkins go on their double-album followup to Siamese Dream? Just how far could they take that unabashed ambition? “Tonight, Tonight” was the answer and the mission statement, not only for the album but for their career stereogum

The Wedding Present – Sucker a self-financed single that was sold at their gigs only (it has since been included on compilation albums) wikipedia

Elastica – Car Song Sexier than either LL Cool J’s “Back Seat (Of My Jeep)” or R. Kelly’s “You Remind Me,” and neither of those dudes were bad enough to fight firebreathing ghost-monsters with laser guns in their music videos spin

Cast – Fine Time turns simple ingredients into something that still shines brightly years later, another truly exuberant tune that encapsulates the wide eyed positivity of the mid 90’s godisinthetvzine

The Presidents of the United States of America, “Lump” “Is this lump out of my head?” Nope, don’t think so spin

Money Mark – Insects Are All Around Us sounds like a lo-fi, indie rock variation of ’60s soul-jazz allmusic

The Apartments – Things You’ll Keep Peter Milton Walsh is the near-myth behind the Apartments, the group he named after one of Billy Wilder’s greatest films. He wore impeccable suits and shades under a mop of blond hair in Brisbane’s sweltering heat. He had a taste for the arcane and the exotic. His music is of another time: post-punk, certainly, but also of Burt Bacharach and Jacques Brel; Françoise Hardy and Serge Gainsbourg theguardian

Aberdeen – Super Sunny Summer gets lovelorn over translucent guitars befitting contemporaries Rocketship pitchfork

Marion – Sleep Tracks like the “Pretty Vacant”-biting “Time” and near-hit “Sleep” were raucous yet tragically romantic bangers – the latter even pulling off a heroic harmonica solo, an act that was likely prohibited by Britpop’s gatekeepers spin

Catatonia – Bleed To their detractors, Catatonia were little more than sturdy student-union indie but the presence of Cerys Matthews always elevated them above the Britpop rank-and-file nme

Pavement, “Grounded” Wowee Zowee was Pavement’s weed record, full of surreal fragments and anxious freakouts, and while “Grounded” is both of those things, it’s also their most emotive pop moment, maybe ever. There’s that opening guitar riff that flaps in the wind like a white flag waving over Malkmus’ resigned appraisal of the perils of luxury when there are “boys dying on these streets.” It’s hard to think about Malkmus as a paragon of political activism, especially when his message was so often garbled in intentional abstraction, but this one manages to convey the crushing emotional experience of observing inequality, even from a notoriously stoned and distant perspective

Sleater-Kinney – Real Man The album is a heady series of refusals: to sell out, to be defined by any relationship, to be claimed by the hungry maw of American masculinity.  stereogum

Comet Gain – Last Night I can still remember the first time I stumbled upon Casino Classics in a chat room for nerds in the late 90s austintownhall

Northern Uproar – Rollercoaster accelerates at a fast pace, whose heavy riffs play in juxtaposition against the spinning riffs mancreview

Wilco – I Must Be High nods toward the sunny pop of Summerteeth and beyond pitchfork

Radiohead – Lucky The Bends had vamped and snarled for the gallery, but Lucky – recorded for a War Child compilation – signalled deeper concerns and higher stakes. Creeping riffs, melodic blasts and shameless melodrama laid the groundwork for OK Computer while cementing the band’s partnership with the producer Nigel Godrich. guardian

The Auteurs – Unsolved Child Murder This track was where Haines – long acerbic, curdled and vicious to no great effect – widened his focus and, darkly, blossomed. His clipped, two-minute pen-portrait of the desperation, horror, vulturism and hypocrisy surrounding public tragedy … is all the better for its whispery detachment. Haines is too tired to be angry, and too fascinated to be preachy. The unassuming music shows his gift for prettiness well:“Unsolved Child Murder”, short but infinitely listenable, switches queasily between reportage and first-person straw-clutching, and is in the final analysis as unknowable as the events it sketches. freakytrigger