9. I Could Live In Hope (1994)

An auspicious debut, I Could Live In Hope established the template Low would follow for their next few albums, that of capturing staggering emotional breadth with a bare minimum of instrumentation and an economy of language. Sparhawk’s long lamented his limited guitar playing capabilities, but as on every Low album, they serve the songs here, be it the sinewy, fractured figures on “Words,” the spacious open strums of “Fear,” or the ragged digressions of “Cut.” His phrasings are often oblique to the point of incomprehensibility, but that only adds to the enigmatic nature of the album, which often assumes a Rorschach-blotter level of inscrutability. To the band’s eternal mortification, it did help to birth the genre known as slowcore that would encompass acts from Bedhead to Codeine throughout the ’90s.