Tidal

Tidal was Apple's first album, released in July 1996 on Work, a Sony Music label. Andy Slater produced it, and the sessions were recorded in Los Angeles. Slater has said that when he met her he suspected a prank, because she was so young and wrote so much of the early material, and he thought "it was a Milli Vanilli thing". Apple said in 2000 that the album was more for the sake of proving herself to people from her past and for trying to get friends for the future. Pelly of Pitchfork credited Slater with a sound based on Apple's interest in hip-hop, classical composers and old-school singers: wonky trip-hop beats and banged keys, featherlight trills, marimba and harp. Jon Brion plays vibraphone on Slow Like Honey, and Never Is a Promise, the only track on the record taken from her demo, has strings arranged by Van Dyke Parks.

Pelly wrote that Shadowboxer and Sleep to Dream are the bones of the persona Apple went on to project, and that Apple herself described Shadowboxer as a song about angry desperation. Criminal was written in 45 minutes after the label asked for a clearer single. Jenny Eliscu of Rolling Stone and Richard Harrington of the Washington Post both called the album mature, comparing it to the work of Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos. It went Platinum within a year by Pitchfork's account and has sold 2.7 million copies. Rolling Stone ranked it 83rd among the best albums of the 1990s in 2010 and 25th among the best debut albums in 2022, Slant placed it 74th in 2011, and the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die includes it. Its first vinyl pressing was a Vinyl Me Please Record of the Month in 2017, and Pelly's review that year ended: "In Tidal, we saw ourselves."