Pavement is remembered as the epitome of ’90s slacker rock, southern California ironists who sang-talk impenetrable lyrics over meandering guitar licks, feedback, and toy instruments. With the advantage of hindsight, and with the disadvantage of living in a TikTok-ruled cultural hellscape where nothing seems that serious or that real, it’s finally obvious that Pavement made some of the most focused, profound, and least ironic music in the entire American rock canon. Like Steely Dan, Pavement was a group of young men who composed corkscrew multipart rock suites with the power to explain the deeper realities of existence to people many decades older than they were. “I swing my fiery sword, I vent my spleen at the lord — he is abstract and bored, too,” lead singer Stephen Malkmus declares in the 1997 song “Transport is Arranged,” words introduced through a charmingly amateurish flute solo.

There was no revolutionary promise in Pavement’s decade of music, no exhortations to idol-smashing, leaving aside that infamous dig at the Smashing Pumpkins in 1994’s “Range Life,” and no invitations to danger or chaos. There were fleeting, sideways visions of paradise in their music, of the shady lanes that everyone needs, or the range where you could settle down once your feud with the Pumpkins was good and settled. But if the Beatles’ pithy summary of their life’s work is that the love you make is equal to the love you take, Pavement’s is reducible to three words, lightning cracks from the cloud of lyrical obscurity at the tail end of 1997’s “Fin”: “No more absolutes.” Pavement was real end-of-the-century stuff, punk’s ethos of sledgehammering critique stripped of its former heroism and shock value. They were nobody’s standard-bearers. As a result, they were free to make music true to the infinite confusion, discomfort, and exhilaration of life in general. “Silent kid, don’t lose your graceful tongue,” Malkmus sang on what became one of the band’s most famous songs, from 1994.