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The 88 Best Alternative Rock Songs of 1998

50. Natalie Imbruglia – “Wishing I Was There”

“Torn,” Natalie Imbruglia’s best-known hit, wasn’t originally her song, as the Internet rediscovers in a yearly content ritual. But it’s undeniably her sound, a sound that “Wishing I Was There” re-executes effortlessly. The song’s like an alt-rock time capsule: there’s Alanis in the start of the chorus, “Torn” at the finish, and a cheerier take on Meredith Brooks and Sheryl Crow vibes everywhere else. Imbruglia’s voice is in prime gamine form, given plenty of crinkly rhymes to chew on (she snaps “pocket/socket” into place like magnets) and spoken-word asides to chide and charm with. An entire lineage of successors, from Michelle Branch and peers’ earnest acoustica in the early 2000s to Julia Michaels’ unfiltered word splays today, aims to sound just like this. —KSA

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KDtH_Xlcm4k

49. Portishead – “Only You”

The third single from Portishead’s self-titled album was an icy showcase for Beth Gibbons’ ghostly vocal. Film noir horns creep into the song’s margins, with speaker-rumbling bass notes and a record-scratched Pharcyde sample filling out the rest. The minimal accompaniment allows plenty of room for Gibbons’s caterwauling, which she uses to explore the space where lovelorn feelings tip into lonesome obsession. A French version maintains the quietly-keeping-it-together unease while heightening the drama even more. Thanks, language of love. —MJ

48. eels – “Last Stop: This Town”

After Mark Oliver Everett returned from his sister’s funeral, his landlord confessed that she had seen the ghost of a young woman enter his house. Deciding that his sister had dropped by to say goodbye, Everett turned the story into the emotional centerpiece of eels’ 1998 album Electro-Shock Blues. As is his wont, Everett veers between the mordant (“You’re dead/But the world keeps spinning” goes the opening couplet) and the touching. Co-producer Mike Simpson of the Dust Brothers provides the musical equivalent by leavening Eels’ baroque pop with chugging passages that feature a scratched-out sample of Vaughan Mason and Crew’s DJ classic “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll”. —BS

47. UNKLE – “Rabbit in Your Headlights” ft. Thom Yorke

The chopped-up drum loop of Radiohead’s “Airbag” is one of the first sounds you hear when you cue up OK Computer, meaning it’s one of the sounds Radiohead chose to reintroduce itself as a band of experimentalists who wouldn’t be confined by the strictures of rock’n’roll. But it’s not as if they were boldly going where no band has gone before—according to Jonny Greenwood, they were just trying to sound like DJ Shadow, the Bay Area wizard of samplers and turntables whose landmark debut Endtroducing… had been released the previous year. So it was something of a Radiohead landmark moment when Thom Yorke teamed up with Shadow himself for “Rabbit in Your Headlights.” The trip-hoppy tune is credited to UNKLE, a project helmed by Mo’ Wax records founder James Lavelle that briefly included DJ Shadow as a member, and the latter artist’s fingerprints are all over the song: minor-key piano chords, secondhand vinyl crackle, a prominent spoken-word sample about death. Yorke seizes the opportunity to revive the vaguely menacing act he’d recently perfected with “Talk Show Host,” seething about Christian suburbanites and fat bloody fingers as Shadow’s music churns behind him. If “Rabbit in Your Headlights” lacks the ingenuity of a proper Radiohead composition, it makes up for it with this venom and dank subterranean atmosphere. Plus the drums sound pretty great, too. —AC

46. Deftones – “My Own Summer (Shove It)”

While Deftones didn’t truly break free of their nu-metal contemporaries until 2000’s classic White Pony, Around the Fur was the record that first hinted at something more. Guitarist Stephen Carpenter has spoken of listening to Depeche Mode “on 24-hour repeat” during its recording, and frontman Chino Moreno’s voice on the album owes at least as much to new wave and shoegaze as it does to Jonathan Davis or other hard rock singers from the era. “My Own Summer (Shove It),” the album’s opener and the group’s first track to gain significant play on radio and MTV, splits the difference between the band’s future sound and that of more traditional nu-metal from the time, with Chino crooning seductively in the song’s verses before erupting into full-throated screams in its chorus. Thankfully, he steers clear of any actual rapping. —TB

45. Garbage – “Push It”

There’s nothing like Garbage’s video for “Push It,” a surreal, stuff-of-nightmares tour of the supermarket aliens and skinsuit executioners of suburban American dystopia. Shirley Manson looks right at home, cooing “don’t worry baby” and hissing the titular imperative with equal conviction. It’s not the words coming out of her mouth as much as what they’re really suggesting: dissociation and the self-referential danger lurking under every metaphorical gimp mask. “Push It” is metallic, visceral, and erotically charged without ever quite saying so—because who needs to spell it out when you can make the beat go harder?  —AG

44. Third Eye Blind – “Losing a Whole Year”

“Losing a Whole Year” opens Third Eye Blind’s self-titled debut, one of the most charming rock albums of the ‘90s. It arrives like a kick in the chest, and encapsulates everything great about the band: tenderness, contagious energy, tuneful melodies, and a healthy sense of fun. Jenkins delivers the opening line with an exclamation point after every few words (“I remember you and me used to spend! The whole! Goddamned! Day! In Bed!”), and the thrills keep coming from there.  —ID

43. Beck – “Tropicalia”

Known for his elliptical allusions and in-jokes, Beck succumbed to specificity with “Tropicalia,” naming the song after the Brazilian musical movement of the 1960s. The song certainly does bustle to the cool, lively polyrhythms of Brazil: Beck and his crack band—which includes Roger Manning Jr, Smokey Hormel and Joey Waronker—vamp over seventh chords and lightly swinging rhythms, evoking the hep bachelor pads of the ’60s. Listen closely, and “Tropicalia” reveals plenty of modern accents, but the key to its breezy success is Beck’s focus on the melody, ensuring that the lush finery of the production is always working in its service. —STE

42. Orgy – “Blue Monday”

Orgy’s cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday” raises several questions, the most pressing of which is whether an industrial version of the song ever needed to exist in the first place. That’s answered in its opening seconds, though. The original’s iconic drum pattern is rendered with alt-rock muscularity—each snare, kick, and hi-hat expelling air like a punch to the solar plexus. This specific energy courses through Orgy’s four-and-a-half-minute distillation of synth-pop ecstasy, with distorted guitars and singer Jay Gordon’s breathy vocals corroding and coalescing at once. —JS

41. Dave Matthews Band – “Crush”

You, amateur music critic: Sure, the dry-humping lyricism of “Crash Into Me” is part of the package, but hopefully Lady Bird prompts a long overdue reassessment of Dave Matthews Band as an ethnically inclusive bastion of progressive musical values.

Me, locked out of my UVA first-year dorm room in 1998 while all eight minutes of “Crush” waft through the door into the common area: Dave Matthews sure likes to fuck. —IC