Pocket Full
of Kryptonite

In August 1991, four guys who'd been slugging it out in New York's East Village bar circuit put out a debut record almost nobody outside that circuit was waiting for. Epic Records had bigger priorities that year, and no single was released to radio at first — the label's attention was elsewhere. Pocket Full of Kryptonite quietly sold around 60,000 copies on word of mouth alone.

Then a Vermont radio station started spinning "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong" off the album in 1992, and the phones lit up. A program director petitioned Epic, the label relented, and the single climbed the charts through the back half of 1992. Its follow-up, "Two Princes," took the band to a different level entirely: a Rolling Stone cover, an SNL appearance, and stages at Woodstock '94 and Glastonbury.

By the time the dust settled, an album nobody promoted at release had gone five-times platinum in the US — one of the more unlikely slow-burns in early-'90s rock. Thirty-five years on, it's still the band's best-selling record, and the songs still sound like a bar band that never stopped believing the room would eventually fill up.