Blindspotting: Superdrag, "Regretfully Yours"

The Legacy: We consumers had no way of knowing it at the time, but the '90s represent the last full flowering of the music industry's old model — a time when, flush with cash, labels could afford to flail around in search of a hit, signing any act that some exec thought might catch on with The Youth and counting on their rosters' most successful artists to subsidize their bad bets. This method produced particularly remarkable results during this decade, thanks to the sea change in popular tastes signaled by the rapid rise of "alternative" and hip-hop; with hit records bubbling up across the genresphere, A&R execs had freer rein to ante up for a bewilderingly, thrillingly broad array of unsigned artists.

Superdrag were one among many bands whose brief major-label tenure produced a heatseeker hit ("Sucked Out," from this LP) and earned them a smallish but devoted cadre of fans. Regretfully Yours, their 1996 Elektra debut, peaked at No. 158 on the Billboard albums chart, and "Sucked Out" didn't have a ton of impact beyond MTV's Buzz Bin and "modern rock" stations, but the band spent the balance of the decade being viewed as one of those acts who were set to pop if they could just release the right single at the right moment.

As is so often the case, that moment never arrived; disenchanted with their follow-up effort, 1998's Head Trip in Every Key, Elektra didn't do much to support the album, and by the following year, Superdrag were indie artists once more. They puttered along until the early aughts before entering the hiatus/reunion cycle familiar to any fan of a quasi-name act at this tier; as of early 2024, they're back in business, but their most recent album, Industry Giants, was released in 2009.

First Impressions: I know I saw this album loitering in used CD bins more times than I could possibly count — it wasn't quite as much of a chuckle-prompting mainstay in those racks as, say, Turn It Upside Down by the Spin Doctors or R.E.M.'s Monster, but it certainly wasn't rare. I'm not sure why I always passed on giving it a spin, but I'm guessing it probably had something to do with the album artwork, which seemed to channel the mod era in the same self-consciously kitschy way favored by a bunch of bands I already knew I couldn't stand. They also seemed to be favored by the type of discerning dickbag who made a habit of acting like any artist who played pop chords with distortion was somehow a goddamn genius; bonus points if there was a Moog or Farfisa somewhere in the mix.

I'm really not sure what I would have heard if I'd bothered to give Regretfully Yours a chance in the moment, but given that its release was roughly concurrent with my big fat power pop phase, odds are high that I would have been forced to acknowledge a faulty first impression. As many, many, many people have noted over the decades since Regretfully's arrival, this is pure fuzz pop for now people — the type of record you might get if Big Star and Hüsker Dü's most user-friendly anthems started making out while My Bloody Valentine awkwardly pretended not to notice from the couch across the room. It's the type of album that is extremely a product of its influences, and I know frontman John Davis views it as a somewhat embarrassing artifact of an artistically embryonic period — he's said he "never liked it" — but it's a lot of fun to listen to even if you aren't old enough to hear it and feel nostalgic for the years when the record industry seemed to be exploding with possibilities even as it was collapsing on itself under the weight of mergers and increasing corporate control.

Hidden Gems: "Sucked Out" is an inoffensive curio of a moment in time when bands scored hits by singing about how they didn't care whether they had hits, but I've always found it somewhat irritating; after taking a few trips through this track listing, my pick for Regretfully's big winner is "Phaser," which blends hazy late '80s college-rock noise with mid-'90s optimism disguised as cynicism. "Throwing sparks now 'cause I'm on fire ... Breathe you in like a cigarette" is late-night poetry.