Have you noticed whenever there’s a retrospective of the '90s the same artists and albums are always brought up? This selective nostalgia has left a plethora of great releases lost in a dark corner of the decade. Fantastic pieces of music — some of which may only be known for one song — that deserve to be heard and mentioned in any conversation about the decade.

The '90s were a time of great musical experimentation. Genres splintered off into dozens of different subgenres, and some artists attempted multiple styles of music, sometimes all at once. These are the artists this list celebrates. The artists who were musically daring, and at times, groundbreaking, but don’t necessarily get the credit they deserve.

With that in mind, check out these eight wildly underrated albums from the '90s (listed in order of release date).

Lucas - 'Lucacentric'

Released: October 1994

Most music fans remember Lucas (full name Lucas Secon) from his monster hit “Lucas With The Lid Off,” an incredibly fun hip-hop song that incorporated elements of jazz, reggae and soul. What many may have missed, however, was that the song was part of a much larger project, titled Lucacentric, that was an incredible example of what can be done with the arts of emceeing, and sampling.

Secon says of his inspiration for the album, “My personal need was to be creatively free, so I sampled what I wanted, and tried to create my own centricity. I sampled Jorge Ben Jor, ragtime, jazz, blues, etc. etc.”

One song on the album, “Spin The Globe,” features 70 samples from all over the world, and emcees rhyming in five different languages. Secon remembers it as “a fun nightmare to put together.”

The wild ride of his biggest hit, “Lucas With The Lid Off,” began two years before Lucacentric was released. “What comes to mind was me not doing well in NYC in ’92,” Secon remembers, “and going back to Copenhagen with no plans, and going into the studio in the winter and knocking out ‘Lucas With The Lid Off,’ ‘Spin The Globe,’ and ‘Wau Wau Wau,’ then coming to London, pressing up 500 vinyls of ‘Lid Off,’ and seeing it blow up on the radio.” The ascent continued, as up next for Secon was “getting signed, and subsequently traveling the world promoting ‘Lid Off,’ and my album, culminating in an MTV award, and a Grammy nom in the US.”

So much more than just “Lucas With The Lid Off,” Lucacentric is an album that holds an incredible amount of replay value today as a groundbreaking piece of hip-hop.

Poe - 'Hello'

Released: October 1995

Poe may be most known for her hit single “Trigger Happy Jack,” but take a listen to the album it’s from and you’ll hear an incredibly wide range of musical diversity. This is what Poe loves most about Hello, “The overall schizophrenia of that album.”

There’s also an honesty, and an urgency, to Hello, the latter stemming from Poe having been in violent situations. “I was almost murdered twice,” she explains, “once in LA, and once in Detroit. I was very aware that the world was not safe, and that made everything feel extremely urgent.”

Poe’s family also played an important role in her life during this time. She notes her father’s passing, as well as seeing her mother blaming herself for everything, and consequently, Poe and her mother sharing an inability to see their own beauty, or value, were “definitive elements” in the creation of Hello.

Another huge influence on Poe was legendary hip-hop producer J Dilla. “Making music with JD had a defining impact on the album,” she says, “and my entire life.”

“J Dilla, in the Hello living room studio, cutting a beat to the Sergio Mendez loop that became the song ‘Fingertips,’ something deep in me understood in that moment that every broken piece of something else can become a complete version of itself the minute you stop crying about that thing that broke.”

With rock, pop, and downtempo, Poe gave listeners a perfect Hello to '90s genre-hopping.

Bluezeum - 'Portrait of a Groove'

Released: September 1996

If you were up late watching BET in 1996 you may have caught the very funky video for Bluezeum’s “Can I Get That Funk.” An incredible combination of jazz and spoken word, the single only had a short time in the late night limelight, and for some God unknown reason it’s the one video that still isn’t on the internet.

The album the song was off of was Portrait of a Groove.

Vocalist Adwin Brown describes the musical endeavor, saying, “Bluezeum was like an arthouse film.” For lovers of jazz, it was an arthouse film you definitely wanted a ticket to.

At the time of Bluezeum’s inception, Brown was working a day job at a community college in southern California, while spending his nights in what he calls the “creative vortex” of Leimert Park, an area that featured jazz, blues and spoken word poetry. He was also writing and recording as much as possible.

While working with keyboardist Bobby Lyle on a song called “Checkin’” for Lyle’s album, The Power of Touch, the song’s producers, Gerald MacCauley and Mikael Sandgren, let Brown know David Witham, who was working with Rick Hahn, was looking for a spoken word artist for “an unnamed, amoebic, 11th hour instrumental project for a boutique label in Cleveland (the label being Telarc).”

The project was Bluezeum, and if you’re looking for credentials you’d be hard pressed to find more impressive ones than the resumes of Witham and Hahn. Witham was George Benson’s music director, and currently directs the orchestras for Broadway shows like The Lion King and Wicked. Hahn is a Grammy winning David Foster collaborator, who has produced for Celine Dion. The music they created as Bluezeum was, in Brown’s estimation, special.

“The two of them melded their expertise, and their data bases, bringing some of the finest musicians on board, including Gary Novak on drums, Jay Anderson on bass, Albert Wing, flute, and (so) on. The acoustic and the tech compliment each other ... Their collaborative style really comes together on the ethereal ‘Everyday and Every Minute.’ Other worldly.”

Brown continued, “Listen to Witham’s pianos and keyboard playing throughout the album. Peep his solos on ‘Dreamtyme,’ and his channeling Bill Evans on ‘Portrait of a Groove.’”

Peep them, and when people talk about the '90s, remember this fantastic album.

Luscious Jackson - 'Fever In Fever Out'

Released: October 1996

A Beastie Boys co-sign is a big deal in 2016, but it was truly gigantic in 1996, and that’s when Luscious Jackson had that co-sign by virtue of being signed to Grand Royal. Grand Royal was a label set up by the Beastie Boys in conjunction with Capitol Records, and it’s the label that released Luscious Jackson’s debut EP and first three LPs.

The band’s sophomore effort, Fever In Fever Out, featured the hit single “Naked Eye,” but the album deserves to be remembered for more than that song alone.

A smooth, cool, vibey album, Fever In Fever Out was a perfect chill out soundtrack. With the kind of music that you can kick back and just enjoy life to, you could easily imagine it playing at a laid back lounge, even to this day.

It’s also a heck of an album to play on a date night.

Fun fact: It was a Luscious Jackson music video that transfixed Buffy in the “Beer Bad” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That same episode also featured a young Kal Penn. (That’s a whole lotta '90s!)

Bran Van 3000 - 'Glee'

Released: April 1997 (Audiogram) / March 1998 (Capitol)

If you put every genre you could possibly imagine into a blender and threw in an array of recreational drugs, you’d get the genius that was Bran Van 3000’s Glee (Note: I don’t know if they were actually doing drugs while creating this album, but from a listening standpoint it has that type of vibe.)

Glee took home the Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year in 1998, but calling the band “alternative” is really just a way of saying “uncategorizable.” A perfect example of this is the song “Forest,” which goes from trip-hop to hip-hop to rock to R&B to alt rock, and ends with a quick burst of aggressive dance music. The song is immediately followed by “Rainshine,” which begins with a little bit of reggae.

The lone single listeners may recognize from Glee is “Drinking in LA,” which garnered some video airplay, although probably more on MuchMusic than MTV. Other interesting tracks of note include the band’s unique cover of Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize,” and the Gravediggaz accompanied track “Afrodiziak.”

I like to think had Frank Zappa still been alive, he’d have been a Bran Van 3000 fan.

Morcheeba - 'Big Calm'

Released: March 1998

The '90s were a time when trip-hop was at its peak, and one of the bands that was at the forefront of genre was Morcheeba. Their sophomore album, Big Calm, was a standout release for both the band and the genre as a whole.

Morcheeba’s Ross Godfrey says what he enjoys most about trip-hop is the musical freedom it provides. “I love the mix of different styles. Electronica, blues, soul, reggae, Tropicalia, folk, even some country! Anything was possible in trip-hop as long as you had a blunted beat.”

Before Ross and crew started work on the blunted beats of Big Calm, he remembers they had just completed quite the epic tour. “I was 20 years old, and I had just spent two years on the road playing Who Can You Trust?, our debut album. When I got back to London I slept on the couch in the control room of our studio. It was a very interesting time, musically, and there was a sense of hope, and abundance, in the world.”

Once Big Calm was released, Ross would be spending even more time on the road. “The Big Calm tour went on forever!” he remembers excitedly. “I think we did three separate coast to coast tours of the USA alone. It was the best time any musician could hope for. We headlined a stage at the Glastonbury Festival. I didn’t see home until we came back to London to play the Royal Albert Hall.”

With emotions flowing at an all-time high, things may not have been very calm that night, but at the pinnacle of trip-hop is Morcheeba’s Big Calm.

The Cardigans - 'Gran Turismo'

Released: October 1998

While The Cardigans may be most known for their 1996 hit “Lovefool,” it was their 1998 album, Gran Turismo, that was their most musically adventurous release.

For a group that had been known as a traditional pop band, Gran Turismo was a huge U-turn stylistically. The album’s lead single, “My Favourite Game,” which gamers may remember hearing in Gran Turismo 2, was the most pop song on the album, but it still had an edge to it The Cardigans’ hadn’t had in the past.

The lyrics on Gran Turismo were dark, and brooding, with lines like, “Do you really think that love is gonna save the world? Well, I don’t think so,” on the standout song “Do You Believe.”

More than simply Swedish pop on depressants, the music of Gran Turismo was groundbreaking. When I spoke with Cardigans’ frontwoman Nina Persson back in 2014, she told me the sound of the album came from the band’s experimentation with a new piece of production software everyone now uses. “That’s when Pro-Tools was brand new,” she said of the time during which they were working on Gran Turismo, “and we totally, without knowing anything about it, dove into it, and used it.”

With Gran Turismo, The Cardigans took an emotion — and a love of musical experimentation — and ran with it. And while the album became a worldwide hit, selling more than three million copies, in the US it never even reached the top 100 of the Billboard 200. America really missed the boat on this one, as Gran Turismo is a classic.

Len - 'You Can't Stop the Bum Rush'

Released: May 1999

As soon as you read the name Len I’m sure “Steal My Sunshine” popped into your head. Although they may be remembered as a one hit wonder, one listen to Len’s album, You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush, and you’ll find that “Steal My Sunshine,” while a pop classic, was actually a bit of an anomaly for the group, which had a focus on old school hip-hop.

Their mega-hit leads off the album, but immediately following it is the posse cypher cut “Cryptik Souls Crew,” which features none other than underground hip-hop legend Moka Only. Up next is “Planet Rock” inspired “Man of the Year,” which is followed by “Beautiful Day,” a song that features a guest appearance by Biz Markie.

Speaking of interesting guest appearances, on one of the album’s rock inspired songs, “Feelin’ Alright,” CC DeVille, of Poison fame, has a guitar solo.

If all you’ve heard of Len is “Steal My Sunshine,” pretty much everything on You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush falls under the heading of “unexpected,” which is why it’s apropos that the album ends with a gospel inspired song, “Crazy ‘Cause I Believe,” that seemingly comes out of nowhere.

While “Steal My Sunshine” was for the pop charts, You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush was for the hip-hop heads. And far too many missed out on it.