Abstract album titles, and the decade with the most wordplay clues.
The 1990s is where titles stopped explaining themselves. Grunge, Britpop, trip hop and the various strands of alternative rock had almost nothing in common musically, but they shared a distaste for the obvious, and the naming reflects it. In Utero. Automatic for the People. Siamese Dream. None of these tells you anything about the record, and none of them is trying to.
That turn towards the abstract is the defining feature of the decade for a puzzle. A title that describes its own contents can be clued by describing the contents differently. A title that means nothing in particular has to be clued word by word, on the plain dictionary meaning of each piece, which produces a specific kind of puzzle: individually easy tiles that assemble into something you did not see coming.
The decade also contained an unusually visible tension between mainstream and alternative, and both are here. Enormous ballads sit alongside records that were made in deliberate opposition to enormous ballads, and in a puzzle stripped of its music they look surprisingly similar, which is a small pleasure of its own.
Band naming had a parallel moment. The nineties produced acts whose names were jokes, acronyms, deliberate misspellings or plain non-sequiturs, which is why this decade carries more wordplay clues than any other in the game.
It is also the last decade in Cryptune where albums and songs are close to even. From here the balance tips decisively towards individual songs, for reasons that have more to do with distribution than with music.
The 1990s accounts for 80 puzzles in Cryptune, split 43 songs to 37 albums. The average puzzle from this decade has 2.3 tiles, and 20 of them are single tile puzzles, meaning the whole answer is one word.
The longest answer from the decade is Automatic for the People, at 4 words. The most common clue types across those puzzles are synonym with 136, direct with 21 and opposites with 16.
The acts appearing most often from this decade are Radiohead (6), Massive Attack (4), Nirvana (4), Oasis (4) and R.E.M. (4).
Do not try to make the answer make sense. This is the most important nineties instruction. If you have decoded three tiles and the result sounds like nonsense, you may well have finished. Automatic for the People is not a phrase anyone would say, and a solver who assumes they must have got a tile wrong will burn points confirming that they did not.
Wordplay clues are at their densest here, so when a clue does not respond to either a synonym or an opposite reading, start looking for a trick. Acronyms, initials and deliberate misspellings are all in play.
The label is worth reading carefully in this decade. Nineties songs and nineties albums were titled in genuinely different registers, songs more direct and albums more abstract, so knowing which one you are hunting narrows things far more than usual.
The 80 puzzles from this decade cover 79 different titles, listed alphabetically with the act responsible. A handful appear twice in the game, once as a song and once as an album, and are listed once here. Puzzle dates are not shown, so this tells you what is in the game without telling you what is coming tomorrow.
Want to know how the clues themselves are built? The clue school takes each clue type in turn. Or go back to all decades.