Like a lot of American kids born in the early 1980s, I first heard Pavement on alternative-rock radio in the back of a car. The car was a Saturn going uphill toward the stop sign on Birch Hill Road; it is as clear and romantically enhanced as my dad’s memories of hearing the Beatles. The song was “Cut Your Hair.” I instantly identified it as both a comfortable fit and yet something totally different, neither the sex cries of Stone Temple Pilots nor the wounded diaries of the Smashing Pumpkins. It was messy but catchy, music that had metabolized the rebellion of punk (“Career, career, career,” the singer shouted, somehow not angrily) but also felt boyish and joyful and refreshingly—almost subversively—pain-free.

Alternative to what? Nirvana was already a platinum-selling band; in the wake of Nevermind, artists as superficially uncommercial as Sonic Youth and the Breeders were given a shot at a market share their predecessors in the American underground would have never dreamed of. The gold rush was on, if not already over; “alternative” was just another way to signal the onramp to the mainstream.

The album “Cut Your Hair” was on, 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, peaked in the nether reaches of the Billboard 200, well below what the band’s spiritual predecessors R.E.M. had achieved by a similar point in their career. Singer Stephen Malkmus said he’d wanted the music to feel like classic rock—that glory, that ease—but good. To hardasses who mistook angst as the foundation of creative insight, they sounded like college boys coasting on an excess of privilege and charm. Critics loved them; most people didn’t care.

Where Crooked Rain felt cool and extroverted, the band’s first album, Slanted and Enchanted, was further off the beaten path. Certainly, Pavement wasn’t the only early-’90s indie band to turn noise into something like pop. But the noise of Slanted felt more like a byproduct of distance or age than a corrosive agent, the grain of an old photograph or tracking lines on a tube TV; noise not as a reflection of industrial modernity but as something vulnerable and soft and flaky, like memory.

The sweet songs are tender and penetrating, the less-sweet ones radiant with the messy conviction of a street preacher; the climactic lines—“Minerals, ice deposit daily/Drop off the first shiny robe” from “Summer Babe”—dependent not on the logic of their language but the passion of their delivery. The album’s title had famously come from the American poet Emily Dickinson, who wrote, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —/Success in Circuit lies,” a line whose quiet threat to the supremacy of romantic disclosure should probably be written into the national anthem. For me, Slanted will always conjure the random, epiphanic quality of sudden light: the bolt in the sky, the gold in the pan, the fireflies in the field.

Malkmus had written the songs just after college, in the nebulous period between youthful ignorance and the worldly disenchantment of whatever comes next. He and the band’s other guitarist, Scott Kannberg, had known each other since grade school and played on the same soccer team; Kannberg later described Malkmus as the brat of the neighborhood and himself as the black sheep, that Malkmus used to tease him and he used to beat Malkmus up, a yin-yang dynamic that contains an already huge amount of information about how white boys of ordinary privilege socialize in America. Listening to and reading interviews, you also get the sense that Malkmus would have casually thrown away some of his most memorable songs—“Summer Babe,” for one—had Kannberg not been there to say they were worth keeping. In other words, Malkmus was the creator, but Kannberg was the catalyst.

Like their sister band, Silver Jews, led by Malkmus and percussionist Bob Nastanovich’s late college friend David Berman, Pavement was a product of the transition from punk and post-punk to the looser and more inviting thing sometimes called “college rock.” The rebellion was still there, but it was softer and less direct, stripped of the myopic discipline of hardcore, more reconciled to the pleasure of pop and classic rock. In a story well-worn in Pavement lore, Malkmus realized his essential separation from punk watching Henry Rollins of Black Flag squeezing a cue ball backstage as part of some psychotic pre-show ritual (Malkmus’ band Straw Dogs were opening); to this day, he seems more comfortable in interviews talking about sports than almost anything else.

One of the great threads woven into the filmmaker Alex Ross Perry’s 2025 documentary/biopic/audiovisual collage Pavements is a jukebox musical called Slanted! Enchanted!, which arranged the band’s music with the conventional theatricality of a Broadway show. The joke is that a band so cool and au naturel would never stoop to something as emotionally solicitous as a Broadway show. But like all jokes, it contains a kernel of truth, namely that under the noise and feedback and general laxness of the band’s presentation are straightforward and sentimental pop songs.

“We’re from suburban California,” Malkmus once said. “And I think our music has that kind of secondhand distance reflected in suburban culture, where everything is slightly artificial.” Call it generational disaffection, call it male posturing, call it playing it cool, but that aloof quality in Pavement is, ironically, what helped me connect so strongly to their music in the first place, not just because I found it comparatively unembarrassing to wearing your heart on your sleeve but because talking around or past your feelings—wanting to say something and not being quite sure how to say it, or feeling that to rupture the silence around a feeling was to corrupt it—seemed emotionally accurate in a way full disclosure never was. The elliptical language, the cloaks of feedback and noise, the almosts and not-quites: This was the truth told, slant.

As much as they belong to the world of indie rock, what I love about Pavement is what I love about the music of a composer like Thelonious Monk, who once famously (or at least apocryphally) called into a Columbia University radio station to complain to a presenter talking about the importance of the “wrong notes” in his music that, in fact, the piano didn’t have wrong notes—that you could play a song as quaint and domestic as “Tea For Two” with just enough dissonance to stretch a listener’s sense of beauty while also conveying a sense of human fallibility that a more polished performance can’t. (The spiky, sour opening of Pavement’s “In the Mouth a Desert” could almost be a Monk line, the way all its ugly little turns resolve so rightly.)

Slanted and Enchanted is music of cowlicks, of family photographs at crooked angles, of accident as essence, the imperfect as perfect just as it is. Pavement happened to arrive in my life just weeks after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, an event that in certain ways deepened the band’s myth but in others made it almost impossible for me to connect with them the way I had before. Was this where that line of creative expression led? Was this, in some ways, what the music was about? Even at 12, I found my own angst both unavoidable and totally boring, the kind of thing you slough off on the way to a deeper and more interesting time. (I’d rather listen to your dreams than your pain, all day, every day.) The laxness and play in Pavement reminded me (and still reminds me) that accidents are natural and big feelings are often as transient as small ones and the margins are usually as lively and exciting as what some people call “the point”—difficult lessons for a natural cueball-squeezer like me, but ones that over time have kept me saner and seem to contain more practical magic than most others.

Pavement’s third member at the time of Slanted was Gary Young, a drummer who operated a small studio in the band’s hometown of Stockton, California, where the album was recorded. Young was more than 10 years older than Malkmus and Kannberg, the weed-dealing punk-hippie (this was when “dealing weed” was still a notable qualifier), passing time with whoever in town still seemed interesting. (“This Malkmus idiot is a complete songwriting genius,” Young reportedly told Kannberg.)

Young was both a gymnast and an alcoholic, qualities you can hear in how his playing fumbles and stumbles and still lands on its feet with a breathless ta-da. (The fills on “Lions (Linden)” on the Watery, Domestic EP, lately packaged with Slanted and Enchanted, are a great illustration of this; Watery, Domestic is, in general, perfect.) As much as Slanted is defined by Malkmus’s sloppy charm (the way he sings “eeeeeeelectricity and lust” on “Trigger Cut”—who else would do that?), it’s driven by Young. He didn’t last, partially because of his drinking, partially, it seems, because he was at the point in life where he felt too old to tour for dirt and sleep on floors. “Any concept of punky went out of the band with Steve,” Malkmus said later, referring to Young’s eventual replacement, Steve West. “He never experienced punk and wasn’t that way. I wouldn’t blame the whole demarcation on him, but that’s one thing that changed.”

It’s true: the Pavement of Slanted (and Watery, Domestic, and the pre-Slanted EPs collected on Westing (by Musket and Sextant)) is a different Pavement than the Pavement you hear on the four albums that came next, each of which has its place not only in the band’s story but in the consecration—and evolution—of 1990s American indie rock: the horns-up/windows-down riffs of Crooked Rain; the odyssean sprawl of Wowee Zowee; the graceful maturation of Brighten the Corners and the slightly dislocated parting shot of Terror Twilight, whose relative slickness hit just as electronic music and a general softening toward mainstream pop redefined what we meant when we talked about “indie rock.”

The band’s second life has been fittingly open-ended. They officially reunited in 2010 for about six months, then again in 2022 for two years. (At this rate, the writer Mina Tavakoli pointed out in a tour diary published in early 2023, their next reunion will take place when bassist Mark Ibold is 72; in other words, Pavement is, Pavement was, Pavement forever.) “Harness Your Hopes,” a B-side from their fourth album, Brighten the Corners went viral on TikTok in 2020, then again in 2024. (“I didn’t put it on the album,” Malkmus said later. “Like, nobody said, ‘that’s a great song,’” to which Kannberg said, “I’m sure I did.”)

One of the reasons I think Pavement has lasted is that they wore their art lightly. They never insisted on their significance or burdened you with their ego or ambition, and yet their music conveys a sense of creativity as novel and expansive as anything we call “great.” I always found it telling how often Malkmus’ lyrics were described as either cryptic or nonsensical, as though he was either hiding his meaning or faking it—but goddamn it if it didn’t come down to meaning one way or the other. He usually changed them live anyway.