March 26, 1996. Stone Temple Pilots release Tiny Music...Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop, cementing their legacy as one of the biggest bands of the '90s.
It's easy to say that 25 years later, but at the time, STP was always seen as the proverbial red-headed stepchild of the '90s rock scene. When they debuted with Core in 1992, Scott Weiland's vocal style was criticized for being too close to Eddie Vedder's. And 1994's Purple was released in the wake of Kurt Cobain's suicide. Of course, these albums were both huge and yielded multiple hits. But it seemed no matter how big they got, Stone Temple Pilots were always living in the shadow of their Seattle contemporaries.
That changed with Tiny Music... The rock landscape was different in 1996. Nirvana was gone. Alice In Chains and Soundgarden were winding down. And Pearl Jam's No Code didn't have the same buzz as their first three albums. So STP were poised to move to the front of the pack. And they did.
Days before the album's release, the band dropped lead single "Big Bang Baby," an MTV-ready (because MTV was still a thing in '96!) banger with a throwback vibe. They'd spend the year following that up with singles "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart," "Lady Picture Show," and "Tumble In The Rough," all of which have lived on as stand-out cuts in the STP catalog.
Tiny Music... is the album that moved Stone Temple Pilots past grunge and into a new sonic space that was wholly theirs. Weiland's continued struggles and a cancelled tour hamstrung some of the residual success, but the album stands up as maybe the strongest and most well-rounded in their discography. The band is celebrating the 25th anniversary with a bunch of new merch and a previously-unreleased alternate version of Big Bang Baby. Check that out below.
