Pearl Jam - Vitalogy

By late 1994, Pearl Jam was the biggest rock band in the world, and Vitalogy sounds like a group actively trying to escape that weight. Released that November on Epic Records, the album arrived on vinyl first, a deliberate choice that paid off in a big way. It sold 34,000 copies on wax in its first week alone, a record for vinyl sales that stood for two decades, while the CD release became the second fastest selling album in history at the time, trailing only the band's own Vs.

The record itself pulls hard against the arena rock momentum the band had built. Brendan O'Brien produced an album that's stranger and more fragmented than anything Pearl Jam had released before, comfortable burying an unsettling accordion experiment like "Bugs" right between hard rock cuts like "Spin the Black Circle" and "Corduroy." "Spin the Black Circle," a loud, blistering tribute to the act of playing a record, went on to win the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance, while "Not for You" channels the band's frustration with the music industry's commercialization of their audience, a frustration that came to a head that same year when Pearl Jam canceled their summer tour in protest of Ticketmaster's service fees and refused to play venues tied to the company for years afterward. "Immortality" closes the record on a quieter, more contemplative note, rounding out an album that feels less interested in being liked than in being honest.

This 2011 remastered reissue presses Vitalogy across two LPs, giving the record's deliberately chaotic sequencing and dynamic range room to come through clearly on vinyl, the format the band themselves prioritized the first time around.