The Pacific Northwest was full of great bands in the early ‘90s, but Boise, Id., was not necessarily on anybody’s radar as the next hot music scene. It was there that in 1992, Treepeople’s Doug Martsch started his own band, Built To Spill, and over the course of the decade became one of indie rock’s greatest guitar heroes. Indeed, those roaring guitars, combined with Martsch’s gently sung, thoughtful lyrics, positioned him as a Gen X successor to one of his favorite artists, Neil Young.
Built To Spill released music on small northwestern labels such as Up Records, C/Z Records and K Records before making the jump to major label Warner Bros in 1995. Though they never scored mainstream hits like some of the bands they influenced, Built To Spill remained on Warners for more than 20 years. Over that period, Martsch’s creative ambitions grew via longer, more complex arrangements and increasingly philosophical lyrics.
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The band’s second album There’s Nothing Wrong with Love turned 30 earlier this month, and Built To Spill has been celebrating the anniversary with a tour that launched in August and will wind down Oct. 12 at the Best Friends Forever festival in Las Vegas. How does this 1994 indie breakthrough hold up alongside their more polished major-label masterpieces?
13. Ultimate Alternative Wavers (1993)
Built To Spill’s first album is one of those underwhelming debuts that you check out after falling in love with the band’s later work. Todd Dunnigan’s unadorned production leaves the young, inexperienced band with nowhere to hide, fumbling through ideas that Martsch didn’t quite know how to execute with precision yet. Even hearing the song that gave the band its name, “Built o Spill,” is a little anticlimactic. “Three Years Ago,” with its memorable lead guitar line and haunting lyric about a bad dream, feels like a breakthrough moment, but it’s just a preview of how good Built To Spill would soon become. A sample of the Simpsons character Nelson Muntz on “Shameful Dread” shows a sillier side of the band that would fade away with time.
12. Ancient Melodies of the Future (2001)
After becoming a critical darling in the late ‘90s, Built To Spill faced a cool reception from a growing fanbase for the first time with their fifth album. Ancient Melodies of the Future goes heavy on keyboards played by Martsch and Quasi’s Sam Coomes, but the meandering songs don’t cast the same spell as the similarly meditative material on Perfect From Now On. “Trimmed and Burning” has a strutting forward motion that livens up the album, but “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss” is the kind of playfully twee song that would’ve worked better on the band’s lo-fi early records. A year after Ancient Melodies, Martsch released his first and only solo album, Now You Know, a more satisfying exploration of the bluesier sound glimpsed on “Happiness.” “Built To Spill used to grab for structure, dividing albums between compact songs and epic gushers; now the songs themselves throb like big guitar solos,” wrote Eric Weisbard in the SPIN review of Ancient Melodies of the Future.
11. Built To Spill Caustic Resin EP (1995)
Caustic Resin frontman Brett Netson was a founding member of Built To Spill, and has frequently joined the band in the studio and onstage many times over the years. In 1995, while both Boise bands were signed to Up Records, they got together in the studio for a casual but occasionally potent 26-minute EP. The opener “When Not Being Stupid Is Not Enough” is a Martsch epic of the highest order, and he cuts loose with some weird and woolly guitar pedal explorations on “One Thing.”
10. When the Wind Forgets Your Name (2022)
In 2017, Built To Spill ended its 22-year relationship with Warner Bros., and a year later the band announced on Facebook that it would return to its “original concept of having a shifting rotation of non-permanent members.” The band eventually signed with one of the northwest’s most storied indie labels, Sub Pop, and their next proper album featured a Brazilian rhythm section (drummer Le Almeida and bassist Joao Casaes), that backed Martsch on a South American tour. Pianist Josh Lewis brings some welcome texture to the gentle, Grateful Dead-ish “Alright,” but this lineup never quite gels. Due to its buried vocals and low-energy performances, sometimes When the Wind Forgets Your Name sounds almost more like a rehearsal tape than a late period Built To Spill album.
9. Live (2000)
Built To Spill’s only official live album captures the band at the peak of their powers with a three-guitar lineup on the Keep It Like a Secret tour. There are only six songs from the band’s ‘90s albums on Live, and that selection leaves something to be desired. What really makes the album worth hearin is a trio of tracks that hadn’t appeared on any of the band’s studio albums. Built To Spill plays one of Martsch’s best Halo Benders songs, “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain,” and they cover the Olympia band Love as Laughter’s “Singing Sores Make Perfect Swords” and the Neil Young epic “Cortez the Killer.” “The holy purpose of Doug Martsch’s songwriting is the riffs it feeds his guitar,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review of Live.
8. Built To Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston (2020)
In 2017, legendary outsider artist Johnston played a brief farewell tour during which he was backed by famous fans such as Modern Baseball and Jeff Tweedy. Built To Spill were Johnston’s band for his two final concerts, and during rehearsals for those shows, the band recorded several Johnston covers. More sessions followed in 2018, though Johnston died of a heart attack in 2019 before Built To Spill’s tribute album was released. Martsch’s versions of Johnston’s songs are a little sweeter and more polished than the originals, but the largely acoustic arrangements never overpower the material with big riffs or guitar solos. Other than “Honey I Sure Miss You” from 1990’s Artistic Vice and “Life in Vain” from 1994’s Fun, Built To Spill largely focus on material that’s obscure even by Johnston’s standards, helping to shine light on lesser known corners of his catalog.
7. Untethered Moon (2015)
In 2012, Built To Spill’s longtime rhythm section of bassist Brett Nelson and drummer Scott Plouf left the band after recording a new album. Martsch ultimately decided to scrap it, instead releasing a project with a different lineup three years later. New bassist Jason Albertini and drummer Stephen Gere are solid and occasionally lively on Untethered Moon, which Martsch co-produced with Coomes. “Rock n’ roll will be here forever,” Martsch sings on the spirited opener “All Our Songs,” but the front-loaded album seems to gradually run out of steam after a few tracks.
6. The Normal Years (1996)
Martsch collaborated with Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson frequently in the ‘90s, including three albums by their side project the Halo Benders. The only Built To Spill album released by Johnson’s label K Records, however, collects songs originally recorded for singles or compilations. Most of the tracks were produced by Johnson in his Olympia, Wa., studio Dub Narcotic, including underrated gems such as “Sick and Wrong” and “Terrible/Perfect.” The Normal Years functions as a snapshot of the great strides Martsch made as a songwriter between Ultimate Alternative Wavers and There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, including the first released version of the latter’s most beloved song, “Car.”
5. There Is No Enemy (2009)
Peaking at No. 50 on The Billboard 200, There Is No Enemy is Built to Spill’s highest-charting album, and the twangy midtempo single “Hindsight” features one of Martsch’s most memorable melodies. Outside of two fuzzy rockers, “Pat” and “Tomorrow,” that bring to mind early Dinosaur Jr., it’s one of the band’s mellower albums, and sometimes it seems like the rhythm section has been mixed too low. That’s not always a bad thing on songs such as “Good Ol’ Boredom,” which feature a rich tapestry of overlapping guitar textures. “Whether or not the words carry personal weight, Martsch is singing convincingly from the perspective of someone thoroughly humbled by loss,” Jayson Greene wrote in the Pitchfork review of There Is No Enemy.
4. You in Reverse (2006)
By 2006, two of the most Built To Spill-influenced bands in modern rock, Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie, had both become platinum-selling rock radio fixtures. Built To Spill, however, had found a comfortable niche as perennial cult heroes, and gave their loyal fans a deeply satisfying album in You in Reverse. Martsch co-produced with Steven Wray Lobdell, an American guitarist who played in later reunion lineups of the legendary Krautrock band Faust. “Goin’ Against Your Mind” and “The Wait” crackle with the energy of a band letting loose in a room with lots of natural reverb, in contrast to the more meticulously detailed sound of Built To Spill’s Phil Ek-produced albums.
3. Perfect From Now On (1997)
Built To Spill’s major-label debut and first album with Plouf on drums, Perfect From Now On marks the dramatic arrival of the band as most people know them. It’s also the first of several albums on which Martsch collaborated on lyrics with his then-wife, poet Karena Youtz, whose brother Ralf Youtz was Built To Spill’s first drummer. The result is a grandly ambitious album with heady lyrics and labyrinthine song structures that Martsch and Ek recorded three times before arriving at the released version. “The longest works, particularly the nearly nine-minute ‘Untrustable/Pt. 2 (About Someone Else),’ play like a series of seamlessly linked songs within a song, a journey that keeps spiraling higher before tumbling into a warehouse full of clocks and wind chimes,” Greg Kot wrote in the Rolling Stone review.
2. There’s Nothing Wrong With Love (1994)
From “Car” and “Big Dipper” to the heartbreaking “Twin Falls,” Martsch fully arrived as a great songwriter on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, one of the jewels of indie rock’s mid-‘90s renaissance. Built To Spill recorded their second album at the Seattle studio known by several names, including Hall of Justice and John & Stu’s, where Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney made their seminal early records. It feels homespun and sweetly vulnerable compared to the bombastic grunge sound of the era, although the codas of “Some” and “Stab” offer a more scrappy, spontaneous prototype of the extended instrumental jams that would dominate future Built To Spill albums. There’s Nothing Wrong With Love is one of the most emotionally affecting albums that’s ever ended with a hilarious hidden track making fun of itself.
1. Keep It Like a Secret (1999)
Built To Spill’s fourth album fuses together the dreamy, openhearted songwriting of There’s Nothing Wrong With Love with the exacting studio graft and inspired guitar architecture of Perfect From Now On. The band’s best attributes can be found throughout the six minutes of “Carry the Zero,” by far their top song on streaming services. From the cinematic slow build of “Time Trap” to hypnotic shimmer of “Else,” Keep It Like a Secret unites Martsch’s pop instincts and prog pretensions for a collection of songs that often take their time getting to the chorus but sound magnificent all along the way.
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