Bringing it back to these shores, Dayton’s The Breeders may have started as a “side project” for Kim Deal, fresh out of the friction of the Pixies, but by the time Last Splash dropped in 1993, it was clear she wasn’t sidestepping anything — she was building her own empire out of distortion pedals, surf riffs, and the kind of dry wit you can only learn from a youth of Midwestern boredom and too much late-night TV. Let’s dive in.
“Summer is ready when you are”
There are albums that feel like landmarks — Last Splash is one of them. Not the kind with a plaque and a gift shop, but the kind you stumble across on a road trip, slightly sun-faded and buzzing with weird, unnamable energy. The Breeders’ 1993 breakthrough is a cracked pop gem with feedback for frosting, an album that has no business sounding this hooky while being this gloriously unhinged.
In the post-Nevermind gold rush, major labels were snapping up anything with a flannel shirt and a frown. But Kim Deal didn’t fall into that trap — she set her own. While Pixies fans were still parsing Trompe le Monde, she was quietly reshaping the rules of alt-rock with a lineup that included her twin sister Kelley and a band chemistry that felt more like a late-night hang than a studio precision project. Last Splash is what happens when you give weird kids a budget and no supervision: guitars wail like sirens on psychedelics, drums stutter and crash like a drunk ballet, and melodies peek through the noise like sunshine through warped blinds.
And yes, “Cannonball.” It’s the song that launched a thousand radio plays and one of the strangest MTV hits of its era — a lurching, elastic groove held together by swagger and reverb. That bassline alone deserves a lifetime achievement award. And that false start at the beginning? It’s the kind of offhand genius bands have been cribbing ever since — just ask Florry, who tip their hat to it in the opening of “First it was a movie, then it was a book.”
But what’s more impressive is how Last Splash doesn’t hang its hat on that one track. “No Aloha” is dreamy and sinister in equal measure, “Do You Love Me Now?” is tender and venomous, and “Saints” feels like a punk cheer squad took a wrong turn into surf rock heaven.
Kim Deal, of course, had already helped write the DNA of alt-rock as the co-architect of the Pixies’ quiet-loud-quiet dynamic—a sonic tension that would become the bedrock of ’90s guitar music. Last Splash doesn’t just revisit that formula; it mutates and expands it. The quiet parts are hazy and haunted, and the loud parts don’t explode so much as ooze out of the speakers like honey on fire.
This album exists in a lineage that runs straight through Nirvana, Radiohead, Pavement, Smashing Pumpkins — all of whom borrowed from the Kim Deal blueprint in their own ways, and today you hear her influence echoing through bands as diverse as Wet Leg, Lambrini Girls, and Japanese Breakfast. But what Last Splash does best is refuse to calcify into a “sound.” It shapeshifts.
This is truly one of the best “accidental classics” of the ’90s — an album that doesn’t try to define a generation but accidentally does. It is an album about desire, boredom, confidence, and low-grade existential terror — all delivered with a sly, lipstick-smeared grin. You can hear the dead air of suburbia, the craving for connection, the laugh-in-the-face-of-you pain that makes it weirdly joyful.
The album art is pure ‘90s daydream: a blurry red and green smear that looks like someone melted a Valentine’s Day card and then took a Polaroid of it underwater. The image, a close-up of a heart-shaped candy dish, is distorted just enough to feel uncanny. It mirrors the music perfectly — familiar but warped, seductive but slightly menacing. There’s no clear narrative, just a feeling, and that feeling is: something’s about to happen. Or maybe it already did and you missed it. Either way, you’re in it now.
You could catch a solid cover of “Cannonball” by a touring act at 529 EAV. You are also likely to hear Last Splash on a GenX former punk friend’s turntable in Morningside as you appreciate that the music bangs just as well to an Aperol spritz as it did to the sketchier recreational drugs from your younger days.
Last Splash isn’t just a time capsule of the alt-rock era — it’s a reminder that the best albums don’t polish off their edges. They lean into them. They live in the transitional spaces between pop and noise, sweetness and bite, clarity and chaos. The Breeders didn’t clean up for the spotlight — they kicked the spotlight over and let it flicker on the floor while they danced in the dark.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Divine Hammer”. I had the pleasure of listening to this album while sitting on the beach, which I highly recommend. This is one of the more surf rock tracks whose rugged edges jut out just a bit more than some of its sisters on the album. Deal touches on her quest for the “Divine Hammer” which alludes to her religious Midwest church upbringing; something most of us can relate to if you grew up in the South.
The ideas of faith and an all-encompassing relationship to a higher power were promised to Deal at a young age, in which she felt never came to fruition. In 2012, when Deal interviewed with Rolling Stone, she admitted “It’s mainly about looking for something so hard through your life that people said was there. When I grew up and went to Sunday school, they said it was going to be really great … I believe[d] everything everybody told me. And that’s why I’m so pissed off now.”
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Saints”. It is one of those tunes that feels like it’s already playing when you walk into the room — raucous, unpretentious, and joyously off-kilter. It’s all power chords and playground chants, like the Ramones if they’d been raised on roller rinks and Catholic school crushes. Kim snarls about summer, saints, and sweets with the kind of cheeky sincerity that turns offhand lines into accidental mantras. “Saints” captures the whole Last Splash ethos in two and a half minutes: punchy, playful, and not here to explain itself.
The Breeders are available on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms, and all places where records are sold. You are likely to find their songs played on SiriusXM stations SiriusXMU, Lithium, and 1st Wave.
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