Best Songs of the 1990s
Grunge, Britpop, golden-age rap and trip-hop — twelve essential 90s songs, each from a catalogue album. No decade fractured quite as cleanly into competing scenes as the 90s did: Seattle's grunge explosion, the transatlantic Britpop rivalry, hip-hop's golden age splitting into East Coast lyricism and West Coast G-funk, and trip-hop's downtempo answer to all of it emerging quietly from Bristol. What ties this list together isn't a single sound but a decade where guitar music, rap and electronic production were all having their own separate, simultaneous golden ages — and, unusually, none of them were talking to each other very much.
Reviewed by Callum Ashworth, 247 Album Verdict · Last updated · How we rank
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1NI
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2RA
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3NB
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4NA
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5BE
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6PU
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7OA
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8VE
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9MA
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10DP
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11LH
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12DD
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13RA
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14OA
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15SP
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16AM
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17BE
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18TL
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19VE
Bitter Sweet Symphony
The string loop lawsuit that became the decade's most mournful opening.
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20MA
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21JB
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22PJ
Black
The song Eddie Vedder refused to release as a single and everyone wanted anyway.
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23R.
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24ND
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Why did the 1990s split into so many distinct musical scenes?
Few decades fractured this cleanly — Seattle's grunge explosion, the Britpop rivalry between Blur and Oasis, hip-hop's golden age, and Bristol's trip-hop scene were all happening at once, largely independently of each other, each reaching a genuine creative peak in relative isolation from the others.
Is this list dominated by any one genre?
No — deliberately not. We spread across rock, hip-hop, electronic and pop specifically because no single genre defined the decade the way, say, disco defined the late 1970s. If you want a genre-specific view, we have decade-crossed lists for hip-hop, rock and alternative separately.
Why do grunge and Britpop both appear on a lot of 1990s lists?
They were the decade's two most commercially and critically dominant rock movements, emerging almost simultaneously but independently — grunge in the US Pacific Northwest, Britpop in the UK — and both are widely treated as defining the decade's guitar-rock identity from their respective sides of the Atlantic.