The 1990s is the most fragmented decade in the entire game. Rock and Hip-Hop are tied at the top of this category, with R&B and Pop just behind, and no single sound dominant anywhere. That balance is not an accident of selection. It is what the decade was actually like.
Something unusual happened at the start of this decade. The alternative rock circuit that had spent the eighties selling respectable numbers to a devoted audience suddenly found itself at the top of the charts, and the polished mainstream rock that had been dominant looked instantly dated. Careers ended in the space of about eighteen months. It is one of the fastest and most complete shifts in taste in the history of the charts.
Britain, characteristically, responded by doing the opposite. Where American guitar music went inward and abrasive, British guitar music got bright, arch and self-consciously local, reaching back to sixties songwriting and mod aesthetics. Britpop has a real presence in this category and it remains one of the few genuinely national pop movements of the era.
The bigger story is that Hip-Hop arrives here as a co-equal force. Over the course of the decade it went from a genre with a large audience to the genre that set the terms: the production techniques, the vocabulary, the business models, the relationship between artists and labels. Nearly everything about how popular music works commercially today was worked out in nineties hip-hop first.
R&B ran alongside it and frequently overlapped, producing some of the most technically demanding vocal performances in the entire game. It is also the decade the manufactured pop group returned in enormous force, sold globally, and was sneered at by critics who have since largely changed their minds.
Worth remembering: the nineties was the most lucrative decade the recorded music industry has ever had. The CD had replaced everyone's collection at a considerably higher price point, and the internet had not yet arrived to complicate it. That money paid for a great deal of ambition, some of it magnificent and some of it indefensible, and it explains why the decade produced so many acts who were briefly enormous everywhere at once.
The even genre spread makes this a genuinely tough category to play. You cannot narrow by assumption, because the answer is roughly as likely to be a rapper as a guitar band as a vocal group.
The 1990s category in Alphabetish contains 97 acts. The genres best represented are Rock (13), Hip-Hop (13), Pop (10), R&B (10), Country (9). 62 of the 97 names contain more than one word, and the average puzzle in this decade puts 10 letters on the board.
The shortest name in this category is Nas, which gives you just 3 tiles to work with. Short is not easy. Fewer letters means fewer distinctive ones, and there are only so many ways to read a small pile of common characters.
The longest is Rage Against the Machine at 21 letters. Long boards look far worse than they are, because a name that size nearly always hides a short connecting word you can pull out and set aside.
14 of these acts carry a Q, X, Z or J somewhere in the name, which is 14 percent of the category. If one of those turns up on your board, you have narrowed the field enormously before you have decoded anything else. Start there.
Because no genre dominates here, guessing by feel works badly. Lean harder on letter counts and rare letters in this decade than you would in the others, and resist the urge to assume the answer is a band.
Play this decade. The 1990s category runs its own daily puzzle, its own puzzle number and its own streak, separate from every other category. Start playing the 1990s.
Spoiler notice: this is the complete list of every act that can appear in the 1990s puzzle. If you would rather work them out for yourself, stop here.
Think something is missing? Suggestions are welcome via the contact page. The only firm rule is that acts with digits in their names cannot be included, because the numbers do not survive the alphabetising step and the puzzle becomes unsolvable.