Dayton, Ohio - IN A CLUTTERED SUBURBAN basement this summer, Kim Deal cupped her hands over the mic to distort her lilting voice into something like the moan of a humpback whale, and suddenly it was 1993 again.

“AhhOOOOOwah! AhhOOOOOwah!”

A few taps on the snare rim and cymbal stand from her bandmate Jim Macpherson. Then Josephine Wiggs came in with the bass line, that inquisitive Morse-code riff that telegraphs within a heartbeat that you’ve tuned into the biggest hit of the Breeders’ all-too-fleeting heyday.

“Spitting in a wishing well.”

“Blown to hell, crash — I’m the last splash.”

“Cannonball” was no mainstream chart-topper, but its delectably off-kilter riff was everywhere in the mid-’90s, making it the 22nd greatest indie anthem (according to New Musical Express), the 83rd greatest song of its decade (says VH1), one of the 500 greatest hits of all time (Rolling Stone). The Deal sisters’ cooing vocals against their scowling guitars, those impenetrable lyrics, that lifeguard whistle beckoning us ... where exactly? The song was in “South Park,” over the sports highlights, on MTV. If you were filming a pitch-black comedy about bank-robbing cheerleaders, as someone actually did back then, you would definitely cue up “Cannonball” to score the madcap heist scene.

For many critics and fans, though, the Breeders weren’t just supposed to be the sound of 1993. They were supposed to be the future — a femme-powered vanguard of grunge that could have, should have, led the way in the post-Nirvana vacuum. But “Last Splash,” the platinum-selling album that spawned “Cannonball,” somehow ended up being the Breeders’ last act in their prime.

“Sometimes I think, God, wow, we really should have probably done another Breeders record,” Deal said dryly. “Because it really was quite popular.” Popular enough that they are marking “Last Splash’s” 30th anniversary by playing it live in its entirety on its curretn tour.

Instead, the Breeders disappeared at their peak, for reasons that are easy to itemize — the drug abuse, the writer’s block, the fights, etc. — but hard to pin on one person. Like their greatest work, their mystifying collapse was a true collaboration.

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What makes a band click? The Breeders were in their fourth year and third lineup before they conjured the magic that was “Last Splash.”

Kim Deal founded the band already something of a legend for her role as the bass player for the Pixies. Wiggs was there from the start, too, a bookish Brit with a master’s degree in philosophy and multi-instrumental chops. Macpherson, who joined after 1990s “Pod,” pounded his Gretsch kit like an Ohio schoolboy raised on Rush.

But it can be argued that the Breeders didn’t really become the Breeders until 1992, after co-founder Tanya Donelly defected to start the band Belly, and Deal managed to persuade twin sister Kelley to replace her as lead guitarist.

The hitch, of course, was that Kelley — at the time, working for a defense contractor in the Deals’ hometown of Dayton — didn’t play guitar.

Kim had previously tried, unsuccessfully, to lure Kelley into the Pixies. But her sister passed up the chance to join the Boston band whose galvanizing loud-quiet-loud sound went on to inspire Kurt Cobain and many others who would better monetize it

In the Pixies, Kim Deal played second fiddle to founder and lead singer Charles Thompson, a.k.a. Black Francis. But the Breeders would reflect her vision. Of the two sisters, she had been the home-studio rat. From early on, she absorbed disparate influences through her boombox or the radio of her Volvo.

“There’s an aphorism that a junkie only gets high the first time and the rest of the time is just trying to relive that experience,” said Steve Albini, the era-defining alt-rock producer who engineered “Pod,” the Breeders’ 1990 debut. “And music is very much like that for Kim. The sensations that she has when she is animated by a piece of music enrich her so much that she will then go through whatever it takes to try to re-manifest that sensation.”

Launched with the imprimatur of an MTV “Buzz Bin” pick, lead single “Cannonball” helped “Last Splash” get classified as alternative rock. But the album defied definition by stretching into country (“Drivin’ on 9”), surf instrumentals (“Flipside”), no wave (“ROI”) and shoegaze. The latter was evoked in “No Aloha,” an echoing tragicomic ballad whose even-more-cryptic-than-usual lyrics (“No bye, no aloha/ Gone with a rock promoter”) made fans ever more curious about Deal’s world. Was it about the Pixies? A boyfriend? Some industry sleaze? Deal still isn’t telling. She never explains her songs.

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Two legends have always swirled around the Deal sisters. One is about Kelley and the drugs.

Outsiders were inclined to assume that life in the Breeders ruined Kim’s sister. That, removed from her button-down world as a technical analyst and thrust into the fast lane, an innocent Ohio gal careened into addiction. In fact, Kelley Deal was pushing the limits long before Lollapalooza. In her work life at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, she ended up going to meetings in the same outfit two days in a row.

“I’d done ecstasy the night before and was up all night long, and one eye was going this way and the other was going that,” she recalled. “I was having all the same addiction and drug issues that everybody was. Lawyers and stockbrokers and Realtors and salespeople.”

“There’s an aphorism that a junkie only gets high the first time and the rest of the time is just trying to relive that experience and music is very much like that for Kim.”

A little more than a year after “Last Splash,” Kelley Deal was at home in Dayton when she accepted four grams of heroin in an airmail package in November 1994. It was a controlled bust. As part of her plea, she agreed to go to the Hazelden drug treatment center in Minnesota.

Then there is the myth surrounding Kim, that she was a creative adventurer stifled during her time in the Pixies by an overbearing Thompson.

To Deal, the theory is not just false, it’s insulting. It was Thompson’s band. She had no aspirations to take it over, and she always was free to leave if she wished. She didn’t need the Breeders to find liberation, and by 1993, the Pixies had run their course anyway.

“People liked my voice, and yes, they wanted to hear it more, so that’s nice,” she says. “But I don’t know how ‘I like your voice’ turns into ‘you’re trapped.’”

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So what happened to the Breeders? The band breaks it down.

After rehab, Kelley Deal landed at a halfway house in St. Paul, Minn. Meanwhile, Macpherson found his hard-won sobriety challenged in the beer line at a Lollapalooza show.

“I called my wife, and I was like, ‘You know, I think I’m just going to drink a beer,’” he recalled. “She’s like, ‘Uh, okay.’”

Wiggs exited for reasons they still debate. Deal remembers her asking for time off to live in New York with her then-partner, Luscious Jackson drummer Kate Schellenbach. Wiggs, however, assumed the entire band was taking a break after an exhausting two years on the road. She also didn’t want to be inside what felt like chaos.

With Wiggs and her sister absent, Deal kept writing and playing in the basement. Macpherson would come over and play drums, and those songs became material for a new band, christened the Amps. After relocating to Ireland to record what would be their first and only album, Macpherson’s drinking got serious. He had two separate accidents that required him to get stitches in the same Irish ER. Eventually, he and Deal had a fight, and he walked out. They wouldn’t speak for 15 years.

“I was also abusing drugs and drinking, so I didn’t pick up what he was going through,” said Deal. “I had no insight or perspective at all. Things were hard, that’s all. And then I came back, and I went downstairs, and his drums were gone.”

The Amps album, “Pacer,” flopped, and Freegard tried to work with Deal on a new Breeders album. The band, at this point, included both Deal sisters but not Wiggs or Macpherson. Deal rolled up nearly $250,000 in studio bills and still couldn’t finish. And with the collapse of her Amps side project, her own drinking accelerated.

To term the end of the Breeders as an explosion or implosion would be wrong, the Deal sisters now say, just as it would be to try to blame anyone in particular.

“It was always just the lack of a return phone call or a nice conversation saying, ‘Well, I think I’ll just skip this one,’” said Kelley Deal. “I think if there had been an implosion or something, that would probably have been healthier almost.”

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The inspiration for the Breeders reunion is easier to trace.

In 2004, the Pixies famously began touring again, as their old cult following began to hit the kind of critical mass that could nudge them past their old acrimony. “I just laugh all the way to the bank,” Thompson told The Post in 2004.

Deal joined the tour, which for nine years grossed tens of millions playing to the kinds of packed arenas they couldn’t have imagined in the 1980s. Eventually, though, she had enough. She won’t go into detail about it other than to say she felt uncomfortable with the Pixies’ decision to record new music.

In the meantime, she and her sister had toured under the Breeders name and put out two records, in 2002 and 2008, without Wiggs and Macpherson. Kelley Deal, who stopped drinking in 1995, relapsed with opioids but has been clean since 2010.

In 2012, with the 20th anniversary of “Last Splash” approaching, Kelley told her sister they should do something with the old lineup. Kim told her she would have to be the one to ask Macpherson if he would join. Without question, he said.

Kim texted Wiggs. She also agreed. The Breeders toured again and eventually, in 2018, released “All Nerve,” the first album of original songs featuring the four of them since “Last Splash.”

This time — understanding, as many bands before them, that there is a thirst for their greatest work — they’re turning back the clock. On the tour that continues into the fall, they play all 14 of the album’s songs.