Worn Out Cassettes and Almost-Famous: The 90s Rock Poll Is Open
A pre-fame Goo Goo Dolls, a Midwest speed metal band that missed the window, a Canadian power-pop gem, and an alt-rock covers fever dream. One gets covered. You decide.
You remember how weird the 90s actually were, right?
Like, the decade didn’t just flip a switch from hair metal to grunge and call it done. There were bands doing completely different things at the same time. Power pop kids. Speed metal diehards. Melodic punk bands quietly writing arena-sized hooks in clubs that held 200 people. Alt-rock weirdos making covers records that had no business being as good as they were.
Most of them didn’t get the moment they deserved. But they got the music right. And that’s exactly what this poll is about.
Every few weeks, we open the floor to you. Four albums nominated by Dig Me Out subscribers, four very different 90s stories, and your vote decides which one we dig into on the show. No algorithm picking the winner. No editorial agenda. Just the community steering the ship, the way it’s always worked around here.
This month? We’re going deep into four records that each tell a different version of what the 90s could have been.
The Nominees
🎸 Goo Goo Dolls — Hold Me Up (1990)
Nominated by Keith P. Miller
Before “Iris” was on every movie trailer, before “Name” was soundtracking someone’s slow dance at prom, the Goo Goo Dolls were a loud, scrappy band from Buffalo that almost nobody outside of their scene had heard of.
Hold Me Up is that record. The hooks are already there. “Two Days in February” closes the album like a band leaving a breadcrumb trail to the sound they’ll perfect five years later. “A Million Miles Away” should have had a video. Should have had real label push behind it. Metal Blade just didn’t have the infrastructure that Warner Brothers would later bring to A Boy Named Goo.
The talent was always there. The machinery just hadn’t caught up yet. You know? We actually covered this one back in Episode 276 if you want a taste of what a deep dive sounds like.
⚡ Battalion — Excessive Force (1991)
Nominated by Chuck Marshall
Picture a Michigan speed metal band that did everything right. They played tight. They played fast. They had the chops and the riffs and the attitude. The only problem? They showed up right as the industry decided speed metal wasn’t the party anymore.
Excessive Force is the sound of a band that would have been huge in 1987 dropping their best record in 1991. Grunge was moving in. Nu-metal was already being plotted in some A&R office somewhere. And Battalion was left standing at the door.
It’s a genuinely great metal record that got caught in the worst possible window. And that’s a story worth telling.
🍁 The Killjoys — Starry (1994)
Nominated by Kyle Bittner
Here is a question: how does a Canadian power pop record this warm and this melodic and this immediately lovable not find a bigger audience?
Starry sounds like the kind of album that Teenage Fanclub fans would have passed around on dubbed cassettes if they had known it existed. Jangly guitars, big choruses, no pretense, total conviction. It spent decades as a CD and cassette-only release before finally getting a proper vinyl pressing. The kind of thing that survives purely on word of mouth from people who stumbled onto it and had to tell someone.
If you don’t know it, this vote might be the one that changes that.
🔧 The Replicants — The Replicants (1995)
Nominated by Vadim Taver
Members of Failure, Tool, and a few others sat down and made an album of covers. That sentence probably sounds like a curiosity. It isn’t.
The Replicants is one of the quietly brilliant things to come out of the mid-90s alt-rock underground. These are musicians with real taste and real chops using other people’s songs to say something genuinely interesting. The originals don’t disappear. They just get refracted through a very specific lens, and what comes out the other side is something you didn’t expect. We actually spotlighted it in our One and Done episode years back, and it’s been in the conversation ever since.
Almost nobody talks about this record. That feels like a problem worth solving.
🗳️ Cast Your Vote
🎤 Submit Your Own Nomination
We pull from listener suggestions every single round. If you’ve been sitting on an overlooked 90s rock album that deserves more than it ever got, drop it in the comments.
Tell us the album, the artist, and make the case for it in a sentence or two. What’s the 90s story it tells? Why does it belong in the conversation?
This show has always been listener-driven. 900 episodes in, and that hasn’t changed. Let’s hear what you’ve got. 🤘