The Breeders

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Essential Albums

  • Last Splash (30th Anniversary Edition)
    Last Splash (30th Anniversary Edition)
    Last Splash (30th Anniversary Edition)

    Few albums capture the charm, mystery and offhand grace of ’90s indie rock like Last Splash. Lead vocalist Kim Deal, at the time best known as the bassist in the recently disbanded Pixies, had formed the band a few years earlier with Throwing Muses’ Tonya Donelly and released 1990’s Pod, an album brought to broader recognition in no small part through the endorsement of Kurt Cobain (“They’re strong women…but you can sense they love men at the same time”). In the rush to capitalise on the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, Last Splash and its lead single “Cannonball” were given a platform that music so casual and strange would’ve never been given 10 years earlier. But the band still seemed irretrievably like outsiders, at once too normal and suburban to fit in with the artists and too dreamy to fit in anywhere else. “It was popular at the time to be unhappy or depressed,” guitarist—and Kim’s twin—Kelley Deal explained later, adding, in her flatly enigmatic way, “but we weren’t unhappy or depressed.” Where Nirvana had rage and humour and Sonic Youth felt like a product of the avant-garde, Last Splash felt like it came from both a sweeter and stranger place. The Deal sisters used to sing Hank Williams and Buddy Holly and Everly Brothers songs at the local biker bar in Dayton, Ohio, while still in high school—an innocence you could hear in the cheer-team catchiness of “Cannonball” and “Divine Hammer” and the barely contained yearning of “Do You Love Me Now?”, which felt like a prom slow dance transposed onto basement indie rock. Music wasn’t their revenge, or their coping mechanism for being social outcasts. It was just something they…played. So where did these fumbling, erotic half-songs come from? That feeling of being a kid and tracing the walls with your fingers in a darkened house at night that comes through “Roi”? The way the noisy chorus of “Hag” explodes like garage floodlights onto an empty driveway after being triggered by some unseen motion? Last Splash cut deeper than almost everything we call “dream pop” in part because it found its dreaminess in places you’d never expect: the sameness of suburbia, the silence of the local sports bar. For all its informality, the music vibrates with an almost subconscious heat. The Breeders were the girls next door.

  • Pod
    Pod
    Pod

    The trouble with Kim Deal being in the Pixies is that it took that much longer for people to realise how vital the Breeders were. At first, Pod can sound slight: The songs fragment more than they cohere, and the recording feels strangely misaligned, like a snapshot where the subject is blurry or set off to the side. Guitarist Tanya Donnelly, who’d met Deal while the Pixies were on tour with Throwing Muses, said the band recorded most of it in their pyjamas, and it shows. But as the gaps accrue, you realise how deliberate the music is. Compared to the band’s peers on the cult British label 4AD, the Breeders sounded scrappy, unsophisticated and distinctly American, steeped in classic rock (“Hellbound”), girl-group sweetness (“Doe,” “Only in 3’s”) and the kind of folksy simplicity (“Fortunately Gone”) that art-rock had by then spent nearly 20 years trying to counteract. But the album’s best songs (“Doe”, “Iris”, “Oh!”) combine that simplicity with a kind of absent-minded mysteriousness that draws you down the carpeted hallways of suburban houses and into their darkened cul-de-sacs, mixing innocence and sex in ways that bypasses the conscious mind. As a teenager growing up in Dayton, Ohio, Kim Deal had been a star cheerleader and honours student who, by her own admission, spent her downtime with local burn-outs experimenting with hard drugs. On Pod, you hear both. The album opened up space for a wave of female-centric indie-rock bands that handled feminism not as an overt trait but an embedded one—they were women, and distinctly, but with a sense of ease and irony that made their implicit politics easy to embrace. It also showed that there were still ways to twist somewhat conventional rock music into new shapes with new poetic resonances. (Kurt Cobain was an avowed fan.) But most of all, Pod paved the way for Kim Deal’s strange, charming world-view, leading to a body of music that has comparisons but no real peers. When the Pixies reformed about 20 years later, the band’s lead singer Black Francis joked that all Kim had to do to get the crowd screaming was say hi. On Pod, you find out why.

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About The Breeders

Led by Dayton, Ohio-born guitarist and vocalist Kim Deal, The Breeders have been one of alt-rock’s most exciting acts since their inception in 1989, combining bouncy basslines with heat-warped hooks, off-kilter guitars and surrealistic lyrics. Deal, then the bassist in Pixies, originally formed The Breeders with Throwing Muses guitarist/vocalist Tanya Donelly as a side project. Bassist Josephine Wiggs and Slint drummer Britt Walford joined to record the band’s first album, 1990’s Pod, which made a clear break from its core members’ main groups with elliptical cuts like the fractured epic “Iris” and a deconstructed take on The Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”. Donelly and Walford left after recording some cuts for 1992’s Safari EP, and Deal’s twin sister Kelley joined on guitar while fellow Ohioan Jim Macpherson came in to drum. The Breeders’ 1993 album, Last Splash, was a triumph, with the giddy “Cannonball” becoming one of the early alt-rock era’s defining tracks and cuts such as “Saints” and “Divine Hammer” combining pop appeal with a skewed sensibility. After touring with Nirvana and playing Lollapalooza, The Breeders went on hiatus in 1994; the Deal sisters reunited in 2001 to tour and record the following year’s Title TK before going dark again, this time until 2008’s Mountain Battles. In the 2010s and 2020s, The Breeders toured constantly, with the 2018 release All Nerve reuniting the Last Splash lineup on record for the first time in more than 20 years, their idiosyncratic spirit and wonderfully weird take on pop music intact.

ORIGIN
Dayton, OH, United States
FORMED
1989
GENRE
Alternative

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