The Artist

Pixies emerged from Boston in the mid-’80s and, in remarkably little time, helped redraw the boundaries of what alternative rock could sound like.

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Formed by Black Francis and guitarist Joey Santiago, the band recruited bassist and vocalist Kim Deal through a famously odd classified ad seeking someone who liked both Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary. Drummer David Lovering completed a lineup whose chemistry was immediate: Francis’ yelps and surreal songwriting, Santiago’s jagged lead guitar, Deal’s melodic bass and cool counterpoint vocals, and Lovering’s explosive, deceptively precise drumming.

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After signing with 4AD, Pixies released the Come On Pilgrim mini-album in 1987 followed by Surfer Rosa in 1988, introducing a sound built on violent contrasts: sweetness against abrasion, melody against noise, whispers suddenly detonating into screams. Their songs could draw from surf rock, punk and pop while Black Francis filled them with religion, sex, death, Spanish phrases, science fiction and images that seemed dragged from some particularly strange corner of his subconscious.

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Their initial lifespan was relatively brief, but the impact was enormous. Pixies became one of those rare bands whose influence grew even larger after the fact, leaving fingerprints across Nirvana, Radiohead, Weezer, PJ Harvey and generations of alternative guitar music that followed.

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They didn’t invent loud and quiet. They simply made the distance between the two feel dangerously exciting.

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The Record

Released in 1989, Doolittle is Pixies at the exact point where their glorious weirdness met something approaching pop perfection.

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Produced by Gil Norton, the album brings greater clarity and colour to the raw attack of Surfer Rosa without taming the band itself. The hooks are bigger, the arrangements sharper and the melodies more immediate, yet Black Francis’ world remains wonderfully deranged, populated by biblical violence, death, lust, ecological disaster and surrealist imagery.

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And then there are the songs. ‘Debaser’ kicks the door open with one of alternative rock’s great opening salvos; ‘Wave of Mutilation’ somehow turns darkness into glorious pop; ‘Here Comes Your Man’ disguises something far stranger beneath its irresistible jangle; and ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ wraps environmental apocalypse and biblical numerology inside one of the band’s biggest hooks. Elsewhere, ‘Tame’ takes the quiet-loud dynamic to near breaking point, ‘Hey’ turns tension into something almost sensual, and ‘Gouge Away’ closes the album in a final eruption.

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Across fifteen songs and barely 39 minutes, Doolittle manages to be abrasive and accessible, funny and disturbing, primitive and strangely sophisticated. Its explosive dynamics became part of the vocabulary of ’90s alternative rock, but reducing the album to its influence misses the point.

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More than three decades later, Doolittle still feels thrillingly alive: a beautifully controlled explosion of noise, melody and glorious strangeness.

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The perfect alt-rock album.