The Best Post-Rock Albums of the '90s

Four days in the studio with Brian Paulson, a Touch and Go release nobody promoted, a sleeve photograph taken by Will Oldham, and a band that had already broken up before it came out. 'Good Morning, Captain' ends the record with Brian McMahan going from a mutter to a scream on one line — 'I miss you' — and roughly half of post-rock starts at that moment.

Verve, a jazz label, ended up releasing this one — Talk Talk had left EMI and nobody in pop knew what to do with them any more. Months at Wessex Studios, dozens of session players, almost all of it binned. 'After The Flood' spends two minutes on a single organ note before the band arrives, then hands the middle section to a savagely distorted harmonica solo.

The first pressing came out on Constellation as a vinyl LP with a crushed penny glued inside the sleeve and a locked groove at the end, because of course it did; Kranky put out the longer three-track CD the following year. 'East Hastings' is the piece Danny Boyle used in 28 Days Later — bagpipe drone, a street preacher, then nine minutes of controlled collapse.

A twenty-one-minute opening track is a dare, and 'Djed' wins it — three or four separate pieces spliced together, including a long stretch where the tape audibly stutters like a skipping CD, done deliberately on analogue gear. Thrill Jockey released it and the title lifts an old Jehovah's Witness slogan. Chicago post-rock as an actual scene begins here, with vibraphones.

Chemikal Underground put out a debut that closes with sixteen minutes of 'Mogwai Fear Satan' — quiet, then extremely loud, then a flute part that has no business working and does. Aidan Moffat of Arab Strap turns up to mutter through another track. Everyone reduces this band to the loud-quiet trick, but what makes it land is how long they're willing to leave the quiet alone.

Jónsi Birgisson plays his guitar with a cello bow, which is the single fact that unlocks the whole sound — that swelling, sustained howl is a bowed Les Paul, not a synthesiser. The title translates as 'a good beginning.' 'Svefn-g-englar' opens with a submarine ping that keeps time for ten minutes while the band builds around it, and Iceland's export industry changed overnight.

Simon Reynolds used his review of this album, in Mojo in early 1994, to popularise the phrase 'post-rock' — so every other record on this list is technically named after it. Graham Sutton's band recorded parts of it in a church in east London. 'Big Shot' is jazz drumming under a hush, with a trumpet line that arrives exactly when you've stopped expecting one.

John McEntire built this one inside a computer, cutting live playing into loops on Pro Tools at a point when most guitar bands still considered that cheating. The title track, 'TNT,' is the mission statement: a clean guitar figure, brushed drums, vibraphone, and a groove that moves like jazz but was very obviously assembled with a mouse. Two Tortoise albums, and they earn both places.

Every track title here is a letter or two — S, G, Wr, C — which tells you how much Labradford wanted to explain themselves to anybody. Kranky released it; the trio came out of Richmond, Virginia. 'S' opens on a bowed string figure over a bassline slow enough to set a clock by, and the record holds that pace start to finish without ever sounding empty.

Ian Crause wired the band's instruments into samplers so that every drum hit fired off a found sound — breaking glass, birdsong, rain — which in 1994 meant three people could sound like a building coming down. Rough Trade released it and almost nobody bought a copy. 'In Sharky Water' is the clearest view of the method: a pop song with the ground constantly giving way beneath it.

Written as a score for a Chicago stage production about the painter Egon Schiele, this is piano, viola and cello and absolutely nothing else — Jason Noble of Rodan making a chamber record for Quarterstick. 'Family Portrait' is four minutes of one repeated piano figure with the strings entering underneath a beat late every time, and it is the saddest thing on the list.

Two drummers, a horn section and a Toronto warehouse — Constellation's other band spent the late nineties building the loosest and most groove-driven version of this music anyone attempted. 'Highway 420' runs close to ten minutes and it swings, which almost nothing else in post-rock does; the guitars lock into a figure and the rhythm section nudges it along instead of queuing up a crescendo.

Dave Fridmann recorded it in upstate New York and Mogwai turned the loud parts down — it opens with a sampled Iggy Pop interview and then mostly refuses to detonate. 'Cody' is the genuine surprise: Stuart Braithwaite actually singing, quietly, about hating the sound of his own songs. Reviews were mixed at the time and it has aged better than every one of them.

Vocoders everywhere, and a Maryland trio deciding halfway through their career that post-rock ought to sound like a repossessed 1982 science-fiction film. Thrill Jockey put it out. The title track, 'Futureworld,' pairs a robot voice with drumming that is unmistakably human and slightly too fast, and the friction between those two things is simultaneously the record's joke and its argument.

The title comes from a Shūji Terayama film and John McEntire engineered the sessions, which is the link back to Chicago and the reason this belongs here rather than only on an indie list. 'Cybele's Reverie' lays Lætitia Sadier and Mary Hansen's harmonies over a Farfisa and a motorik pulse, sung in French, and turns a krautrock groove into something like a pop single.