The Second Coming of Alanis

The real commercial strength of the album can't be gauged before next year, but right now the buzz centers on how many sales Junkie will score its first week, and if it will set a record. Odds are strong that it'll best the '98 mark now held by the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty, which came out of the box with 681,000. An even loftier goal would be the first-week sales record since SoundScan's inception in 1991: the 950,000 copies Pearl Jam's Vs. sold in 1993.

Not that you'll get anyone at Morissette's label, Maverick, or its distributor, Warner Bros. (which, like ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, is owned by Time Warner), to comment on that — or anything else. Morissette's manager, Scott Welch, has actually imposed an unheard-of gag order on execs at both labels, in what could be considered either a bizarre control-freak power play or a savvy anti-jinxing measure. (Further compounding the corporate reticence are the delicate negotiations to renew Warner's profitable partnership with Maverick — complicated by the rumored imminent buyout of co-chairman Freddy DeMann, who's reportedly been feuding with his former management client Madonna and Guy Oseary, the A&R wunderkind who signed Morissette.)

Privately, though, many of these folks will allow that there are certain expectations. ''People are hoping that it will sell a million copies, or close to a million, the first week,'' says a source closely involved with the project. ''The feeling is that it could be the biggest first week ever. I think everybody believes that, industry-wide.'' A more disappointing figure would be in the area of 600,000, the source acknowledges, ''but disappointment is a relative term.''

One believer at the retail level is the usually more curmudgeonly Stan Goman, executive VP and COO of Tower Records, who's ''buying more than we are for other superstar sophomore records. It's more than we're buying for Jewel. I think the music is there. We haven't had any decent records all summer, and it's coming out before the onslaught of crap in November.... This record I'm not skeptical about.''

But retailers might be alarmed by the less-is-more approach Morissette and her manager are taking toward promotion; they've lined up just half a dozen interviews with American TV outlets and periodicals this year, and her just-wrapped mini-tour hit small halls and clubs in only 13 cities, with a more substantial 1999 tour not yet announced.

Moreover, before she returned to the studio with Pill producer and cowriter Glen Ballard in early 1998, she'd been almost completely out of the public eye for the better part of two years. When photographers did get her in their sights last year, it wasn't at a Hollywood premiere or nightclub but at a triathlon held northwest of L.A. (Once an overachiever, always an overachiever.) Her other public appearances have been on the humanitarian-interest circuit — Tibetan Freedom benefit concerts, a trip to Cuba, a sojourn in India (which, besides getting a name drop in ''Thank U,'' inspired the less grateful ''Baba,'' her equivalent of the Beatles' ''Sexy Sadie'').