To understand the role Pavement played in the transition from punk fury to the open-endedness of indie rock, let’s go back to a story from singer Stephen Malkmus’ high-school band, Straw Dogs. This was Stockton, California, 1983: The Dogs are backstage at the Fremont Labor Lodge getting ready to open for Black Flag. Malkmus is 16. Good student, varsity tennis player, a little willowy. And there’s Henry Rollins—penetrating, warrior-like Henry Rollins—pacing back and forth in front of him, squeezing a cue ball. That’s punk, Malkmus thought. And I’m not. There’s plenty of dissonance on Slanted and Enchanted (“No Life Singed Her,” “Conduit For Sale!”). But where the noise of punk always felt in service of tearing down what’d been there before and building the world anew, Pavement used it as a means of romantic retreat, like the hiss of the ocean (“In the Mouth a Desert”) or muffled whispers under heavy blankets (“Perfume-V”). You could disappear into these tracks, and it often sounded like Malkmus had—boyishly voicing his yearnings through streams of words whose imprecision captured the feelings behind them better and more honestly than precision ever could (“Trigger Cut”’s “Lies and betrayals/Fruit-covered nails/Electricity and lust”). The album’s title, suggested by Malkmus’ college friend and late Silver Jews vocalist, David Berman, was a riff on a line from Emily Dickinson, whose precious-but-obscure poetry served as a kind of ancestral altar at which the music could be set: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Even in the midst of bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth, Pavement’s conversion of noise into pop—complete with prom-ready ballads (“Here”) and sweet sha-la-las (“Trigger Cut”)—felt both special and rare, a conversion of post-punk’s aversion to the obvious into songs you could put on mixtapes for a crush. Here, divisions between the intensity of punk and accessibility of classic rock seemed less important, ditto what it meant to be a heartthrob or an outcast, a jock or a nerd (Malkmus was arguably both). That the band never seemed like they were trying too hard made them both a sign of their slacker times but also a welcoming presence after an era of New Wave haircuts and cue-ball-squeezing powerlifters and other supposedly fresh riffs on the same old rock ’n’ roll preening. Listen under the feedback: They’re writing love letters.