Buying five albums and making them your entire personality

This week: for music ep 450, we revisit the music of 1996. In a Very Special Episode to mark 450 music episodes (Big Round Number!) and kick off season 2026, Doc, Beeso and Adam draft, snipe and gripe their way through a snake draft of the biggest and best albums of 1996, and discover that the Venn diagrams of ‘biggest’ and ‘best’ might not overlap as much as you’d think.WARNING. NOSTALGIA IS AN ADDICTIVE DRUG. Symptoms of nostalgia fixation can include solely listening to music from your teens and twenties, claiming to not know the names of any top 40 acts or complaining endlessly about modern Triple J. If you or someone close to you is addicted to nostalgia, help is available. Call 1-800-TRIPBALL and a Doctor will prescribe you some weird loud nonsense off his Release Radar with a couple hundred Spotify listeners.7:58  Draft order pop quiz, hotshot11:49  A somewhat consensus first pick18:19  A challenging number two23:13  #3 - a difficult second album vindicated28:53  #4 - a career 180 on the turn32:45  #5 - anyhow* here’s Wonderwall 38:59  #6 - alternative universe sequels 44:30  #7 - Toowong Sanity vs HMV Pitt St47:29  #8 - ONE OF US53:12  Intermission - Adam’s favourite albums of 2025, 2024 and 202657:18  Bad ad reads and worse medical advice58:40  #9 - unpredictable predictabilities62:59  #10 - undiscovered discoveries  66:45  #11 - there’s always a punisher72:36  #12 - missed by a continent and many consonants75:37  #13 - nostalgia for live acts, $2.50 beers and trying too much83:34  #14 - it’s called ash, or æsc in the original Old English Latin90:28  #15 - you can’t be it if you can’t see it94:08  Also mentioned in dispatches Next week: enough wallowing in 90s nostalgia, we’re quantum-leaping into the future, straight to… 2015-16. It was good for Leicester and LeBron, if noone else. We’ll be drafting our favourite albums of the first year-and-a-fair-bit of the pod, but will all the albums actually be from the pod?Spotify playlists: 2025 review archive | Doc and Beeso’s 2025 mixtapes | All our playlistsThe list: Our previous review albums and year-end top fivesFind us on: Spotify Podcasts | Apple Podcasts | RSS feed for other appsSocials: Beeso on Bluesky | Doc on BlueSky | Pod Facebook | Pod email