The year 1994 signalled grunge’s last grunt as the dominant sound of alterna-teen culture. While Soundgarden enjoyed their first No. 1 record with Superunknown, Pearl Jam were actively avoiding MTV to deflate their own hype and the Nirvana saga came to a tragic end. But where Stone Temple Pilots’ 1992 debut, Core, presented the San Diego upstarts as eager shotgun riders on the grunge wave, their 1994 follow-up savvily anticipated the changing cultural tides by looking beyond Seattle for inspiration. Purple hardly skimps on the hard-rock swagger that made Core a multi-platinum smash—the frenzied “Unglued” and sludgy “Meatplow” pack the sort of pulverising riffs that launched a million stage dives. But the album reveals surprising new dimensions to Stone Temple Pilots’ attack: on “Vasoline”, they hammer away at a fuzzy two-note refrain until it locks into a hypnotic psychedelic groove (the bongos certainly help), and while “Big Empty” revisits the skyscraping peaks of Core’s calling-card single, “Plush”, it takes its sweet time getting there atop some bluesy slide-guitar licks. The most dramatic developments, however, are happening in Scott Weiland’s larynx. No longer the Vedder-like warbler of old, the singer invests the campfire-folk reprieve “Pretty Penny” with Beatles-esque bonhomie, and showcases a previously untapped sensitivity on “Interstate Love Song”, which sounds like a ‘70s soft-rock ballad dressed up in a flannel shirt and cut-off shorts. A resounding repudiation of the critics who initially dismissed them as alt-rock also-rans, Purple displays the first real flashes of the melodic ingenuity and glammy eccentricity that would ultimately distinguish Stone Temple Pilots from their mosh-pit peers.