While Melissa Auf der Maur’s stints playing bass for Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins made the Montreal native a certified ’90s alt-rock icon, decades later, it feels like we’re still learning more about who she really is. BASS WOMB ROOM arrives on the heels of Auf der Maur’s revelatory 2026 autobiography, Even the Good Girls Cry, and a book/gallery exhibit showcasing her photography, and this collection of her ’90s-era home recordings similarly serves to illuminate the inner workings of a public figure. More than a random grab bag of old demos, BASS WOMB ROOM is an artfully constructed collage that doubles as a form of audio memoir, seamlessly weaving together doomy drone experiments, goth-folk meditations, found-sound explorations, and a deconstructed Roxy Music cover (“Love Is the Drug”) with snippets of Courtney Love and Billy Corgan’s stage banter, like some surrealist dispatch from someone caught in the eye of the ’90s alterna-storm. A far cry from the radio-ready stoner rock Auf der Maur released as a solo artist in the 2000s, BASS WOMB ROOM makes it clear that the avant-garde instincts she’s indulged since co-founding the Hudson Valley’s adventurous Basilica SoundScape festival in 2011 have been there from the very beginning. Our Favorite Track: “...And the Next Day,” a wobbly acoustic lullaby that suggests an alternative universe where Auf der Maur is hailed as a lo-fi bedroom-pop pioneer.