For as long as guitars have been plugged into amplifiers, the loudest noise in America has tended to emanate from the Pacific Northwest. The region played a transformative role in the evolution of rock’n’roll many times over throughout the 1960s and ’70s, with Washington State alone birthing everyone from proto-punks the Sonics to Jimi Hendrix to Heart. But all that was a mere distant rumble of thunder compared to the storm that erupted when, in the mid-’80s, a bunch of long-hairs in the Seattle area came to the then-radical conclusion that Black Flag and Black Sabbath shared more than just a favorite color.
Numerous books, documentaries, and podcasts have been devoted to the subject of how and why grunge came to be. (Take your pick: boredom, shitty weather, robust local college-radio support, Reagan-era malaise, grim local history, easy access to good coffee, deep-seated aversions to both hair-metal pageantry and hardcore orthodoxy.) Initially, what became known as grunge was a thriving regional scene that rallied around proudly scuzzy trailblazers like Green River, crucial compilations like C/Z Records’ Deep Six, and impoverished but media-savvy labels like Sub Pop. However, with the 1991 insurrection of Nirvana’s Nevermind, grunge became the sort of once-in-a-generation phenomenon that permanently altered the sound of rock radio, turned the surplus-store discount rack into catwalk fodder, and inspired hordes of disaffected Gen Xers to grow their hair longer and shower less.
As with any suddenly hip genre, pretty much everyone slapped with the grunge label rejected it, which paradoxically gave it more power and reach. Certainly, there was a canyon of aesthetic difference between, say, the cheeky garage-punk of Mudhoney and the dramatic, Sabbath-schooled dirges of Alice in Chains, but collectively they represented a united affront to the corporate-rock excesses of the ’80s. And just as it served as the battering ram that dismantled the gates separating America’s freak scene from the top of the charts, grunge’s revolution raged in both directions, luring scores of impressionable kids into the nation’s DIY ecosystem, with all those obscure bands that Kurt Cobain name-dropped in interviews serving as wormholes into an outsider musical universe.
As a supplement to our recent Best Albums and Songs of the 1990s lists, here is a tally of the 25 greatest grunge records of that particular decade. To certain purists, the late-’80s was grunge’s true golden age, when classics like Nirvana’s Bleach and Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff came out, a few years before the community got turned into a Halloween costume. But the genre’s legacy as it exists today—both as a perennial, fuzzbox-abusing sound and as aspirational proof that the weirdos sometimes do come out on top—was largely written in the ’90s. Like grunge itself, this list isn’t confined to Washington State; it’s a reflection of how thoroughly grunge reshaped the musical landscape at the time, by attracting countless bandwagon jumpers, prompting veteran alterna-acts to twist their amp knobs a few notches to the right, and catapulting a small army of unmarketable misfits onto major-label rosters.
The albums featured here cover the period spanning 1990 to 1994, which symbolically marked the moment when the promise of grunge gave way to the reality of Sponge—i.e., a wave of opportunists who could front with angsty, mosh-bro energy but lacked the stinging irony and self-aware humor that was always at the heart of the original scene.
However, if grunge was the product of a very specific time and place, it has—like garage-rock, punk, and heavy metal before it—graduated from buzzy subgenre to a permanent feature in the rock playbook, because the fuck-it-all feelings behind it remain eternal, too. Like the sort of moldy fungi the word once described, grunge has continued to spread and mutate far beyond its point of origin, its influence now manifest in everyone from irrepressible pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo to modern-day indie-rockers like Soccer Mommy to nu-school noisemakers like Chat Pile to Cobain-obsessed rappers like Post Malone (while still inspiring runway looks in clockwork five-year cycles).
These are the records that allowed grunge to transcend trendiness and become a sound that never goes out of style, listed in chronological order.
Read Pitchfork’s list of the best albums of the 1990s here and best songs of the 1990s here, and check out our full ’90s package here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Mother Love Bone: Apple (1990)
Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in March 1990, at age 24, mere days before his band was set to release this debut album. His passing proved to be a particularly pivotal event in the history of grunge. Soon after, Mother Love Bone guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament became demo-trading pen-pals with a San Diego gas-station attendant named Eddie Vedder, marking the beginning of Pearl Jam. And who knows: If the psychedelically inclined Wood had survived, it’s entirely possible that Seattle would be better known today for floral patterns and cosmic power ballads than flannel and dropped-D tuning.
Already a scene star thanks to his tenure in ’80s hard rockers Malfunkshun, Wood was destined to enter his rightful golden-god realm with Mother Love Bone, whose vision of grunge hit the sweet spot between Guns N’ Roses’ underbelly grit and Jane’s Addiction’s boho-Zeppelin ambitions. Even as it embodies the very qualities—glamor, world-beating attitude, sexualized swagger—that grunge was supposed to reject, Apple is nonetheless a foundational text for prophesying how the genre’s grimy guitar sound could be reengineered for arena-rattling mass appeal. (After all, it’s just a short crowd-surf from the cocksure choogle of “Holy Roller” to the dam-bursting momentum of “Even Flow.”) More significantly, the album’s sad epilogue cast a dark cloud over the scene that even its most successful ambassadors would never fully escape. –Stuart Berman
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Mark Lanegan: The Winding Sheet (1990)
As lead singer for Ellensburg, Washington quartet Screaming Trees, Mark Lanegan had helped formulate grunge’s mix of grubby garage-rock, brown-acid psychedelia, and corrosive melodies. But on his 1990 solo debut, he looked back far beyond the ’60s and ’70s to forge spiritual communion with pre-rock forms like folk, blues, and murder ballads, which included digging up a certain Lead Belly standard that his friend and backing singer Kurt Cobain would later claim for himself. A largely acoustic and piano-based affair, The Winding Sheet is hardly a dictionary-definition grunge album. But in highlighting both the delicate and disquieting qualities of Lanegan’s sandpapered voice, it set the standard for the unplugged sound that became a go-to mode for Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, proving that, for all its fuzz-caked guitars, grunge was really defined by a doomy, seasick feeling. –Stuart Berman
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Tad: 8-Way Santa (1991)
If grunge were a person, it’d be Tad Doyle, whose hulking, howling, scowling presence was the perfect advertisement for his group’s guttural sludge-punk. It’s an image the Sub Pop publicity department played up to the hilt, with press photos that looked more like stills from a grindhouse flick. But by 1991—with the likes of Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Screaming Trees already entrenched in the major-label ecosystem—even Seattle’s gnarliest groups were getting ready for their close-up. 8-Way Santa was Tad’s final release for Sub Pop before the band became one of the unlikeliest Warner Bros. signings of all time.
While the album hardly skimped on hillbilly heavy-metal grinds, there’s also a concision and clarity to the performances that, at times, yield surprising moments of melodic levity. Credit producer Butch Vig, then a midwestern noise-punk foot solider who was still a few months away from steering Nirvana’s commercial crossover on Nevermind. In some respects, 8-Way Santa made that breakthrough possible: After all, if Vig could help Tad sound more like R.E.M., then turning Nirvana into radio stars would be a cake-walk. –Stuart Berman
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Temple of the Dog: Temple of the Dog (1991)
Temple of the Dog wasn’t so much a supergroup as a group séance. Formed by two members of Soundgarden (vocalist Chris Cornell and drummer Matt Cameron) and the core of what was about to become Pearl Jam (ex-Mother Love Bone founders Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, along with guitarist Mike McCready and budding singer Eddie Vedder), the ad-hoc band’s one and only album was effectively a funeral prayer service for their late friend, Andrew Wood.
But while the album is best remembered for introducing Vedder to the world on the alt-karaoke classic “Hunger Strike” (which taught a generation the proper way to enunciate “brrrrreead”), it marked an important evolutionary step for everyone involved, planting the seed for a more emotionally vulnerable strain of songwriting that would gradually flourish within both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden’s amped-up onslaught. Today, the album is just as much a eulogy for the late Cornell—from the 11-minute wah-wahed workout of “Reach Down” to the slow-burning acoustic-blues rapture of “Times of Trouble,” the record is loaded with career-best vocal performances where the singer elevates grunge to the realm of gospel. –Stuart Berman
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Smashing Pumpkins: Gish (1991)
Without Gish, there would probably be no Nevermind as we know it. Recorded in Butch Vig’s studio in Madison, Wisconsin, the Smashing Pumpkins’ debut was guided by the dreamy, classic rock ear of Billy Corgan. The frontman once said that Gish is inspired by the sound of Rick Rubin trying to sound like Black Sabbath—a dry and imposing sound, extremely loud guitars, similar to but totally different than what Steve Albini was doing in Chicago. In 1991, the Pumpkins were still on an independent label, but they worked with the fastidious approach of a blockbuster rock act, swinging into songs with gas-face guitar solos, undergirded by the jazz-prog drumming of Jimmy Chamberlin. Gish—named after silent film icon Lillian Gish—would become one of the best-selling indie records ever at the time. After the release of Nevermind—which was guided by Vig and the production ideas he got from Corgan—the Pumpkins were cited to be the “next Nirvana.” They weren’t, but it could be argued they were there first. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Mudhoney: Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (1991)
When Mudhoney belched out their debut single, “Touch Me I’m Sick,” in 1988, they instantly became the leading cause célèbres, satirists, and bullshit detectors of the Seattle scene, forsaking their peers’ ’70s hard-rock worship for pure Stoogean insolence. By the time they released their second album, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, in the summer of 1991, they were Sub Pop’s top-selling band—at least until all the millions of kids who bought Nevermind a few months later discovered that Nirvana had put out another record before it.
But on EGBDF, Mudhoney shrewdly took a step back from the sludgy sound they helped popularize to hitch themselves to a more time-tested ’60s-garage lineage, complete with Farfisas, hey-hey-hey hooks, and acoustic guitars slicing through the fuzz. Coming at a time when America was turning into one giant mosh pit, this album was an invitation to do the watusi, cementing Mudhoney’s status as the contrarians of the contrarians. –Stuart Berman
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Pearl Jam: Ten (1991)
Underground punk and hard rock were the two main tributaries that flowed into the Puget Sound to create the brackish waters of grunge. If Nirvana drank from the first bank, Pearl Jam slurped deeply from the second. Formed from the ashes of Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam came together in dribs and drabs, most urgently after the band heard back from a San Diego surfer who was then working the graveyard shift at a Chevron station. Eddie Vedder put lyrics and vocals to a demo tape the rhythm section had been shopping around in order to find a new frontman. One of those songs would become “Alive,” a slow-burning, mid-tempo rocker about Vedder’s estranged biological father, who died unbeknownst to him when he was a teenager. All of the band’s might is captured in the affirmation of “Alive”; where other groups subliminized pain, Pearl Jam sought to transcend it.
You could roll your eyes at Pearl Jam’s apparent bluster, oceanic sound, and Ace Frehley-inspired solos, as Kurt Cobain did. And in the end, Pearl Jam’s debut, Ten, wasn’t nearly as big as Nevermind, which would come out just a month later. But Ten is undoubtedly the second-largest record in the grunge canon, and perhaps one of the most perennially cherished, because of its roots in the institution of classic rock. Sure, there’s way too much reverb, and the back side of the record is about as baggy as one of bassist Jeff Ament’s hats. But Ten put forward a sound that every major label band could try to iterate on, drawing from music that packed stadiums and reached the rafters. From the sore necks headbanging to “Even Flow” to the singed thumbs from holding lighters in the air for the entirety of “Black,” Ten was the beginning of Pearl Jam’s tenure as the people’s rock band. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Nirvana: Nevermind (1991)
While alternative rock was certainly no secret throughout the ’80s, Nirvana’s uncomfortable rocket ride to the top on 1991’s Nevermind marked the genre’s supernova moment. Launched by “Smells Like Teen Spirit”’s bare, twitchy guitar intro and explosive drums, the album’s ennui, angst, and incredible songwriting made it suddenly seem like talented outcasts could rule the world. Many would try to bottle Nirvana’s soured essence in the years following, but few other bands were working with the same quality of raw components: Krist Novoselic’s hypnotic basslines, Dave Grohl’s furious pace, and Kurt Cobain’s ability to create anthemic choruses out of the blunt-edge scrape of a single word. Veering through tempos with an alchemic mix of poignancy and catchiness, Nevermind explores the duality of acceptance and rejection, but never makes it feel like a lesson. Fuzzed-out “In Bloom” and chill “Come As You Are” manage to be opposite sides of the same coin, with Cobain sizing up the people who liked all their pretty songs but didn’t fully grasp them, before opening his arms to misfits everywhere. Call it a generational changing of the guard if you must, but these 12 songs connected with young listeners around the world—some who just thought they rocked, and many more who recognized Cobain’s wary POV for what it was: the truth. –Jessica Letkemann
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Soundgarden: Badmotorfinger (1991)
Soundgarden were always a few steps ahead of the pack. Among the first Sub Pop signings, they were also the first in the scene to graduate to major-label patronage, get nominated for Grammys, and prove their mettle opening for arena-rock acts. But if 1989’s A&M debut Louder Than Love captured a band both embracing and satirizing ’70s-rock mythology, Badmotorfinger liberated Soundgarden from their next-Zeppelin destiny with a fearless and peerless display of prog-punk dynamism, psychedelic expanse, and metallic modernism.
Soundgarden’s third album arrived in the thick of grunge’s 1991 epoch, soon after Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten, and it initially received more attention for its lead single/video, “Jesus Christ Pose,” getting banned by MTV for its artful bastardization of Christian imagery. But what’s more remarkable is that such a relentless and dissonant track was even considered for rotation in the first place. With new bassist Ben Sheperd bulking up drummer Matt Cameron’s bulldozer swing, guitarist Kim Thayil dropping equal doses of Tony Iommi riffage and Thurston Moore avant-screech, and Chris Cornell’s five-alarm shriek permanently set to beast mode, Badmotorfinger is as nerve-wracking and exhilarating as winning a first-person-shooter video game on expert level. The band’s next record would be their commercial peak, but Badmotorfinger was Soundgarden’s true leap into the superunknown. –Stuart Berman
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Afghan Whigs: Congregation (1992)
Cincinnati’s Afghan Whigs were one of the first Sub Pop acts that hailed from outside the Seattle area, and not everyone in the scene was happy about it: As legend has it, Sub Pop’s top earner, Mudhoney, jumped ship for Reprise in 1992 because they were upset their royalties were being used to underwrite out-of-town acts unaffiliated with their core community. But the Whigs were separated from Seattle by more than just geography. Along with providing a sneak peek at the soulful center anchoring frontman Greg Dulli’s ever-expanding vision, Congregation showed how grunge’s roar could express an emotional depth beyond anger and disillusionment. Full of white-knuckled songs brimming with sensuality, obsession, and betrayal, the album plays out like some alt-rock soap opera. Teenage angst would pay off well for some, but by this point, the Whigs had already tapped into the rich dramatic terrain of midlife crises. –Stuart Berman
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L7: Bricks Are Heavy (1992)
With Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and Chris Cornell all over MTV and magazine covers, it was easy to get the impression that grunge was a boys-only zone. But that wasn’t entirely the case: Among the scene’s ’80s pioneers were Bam Bam, fronted by Tina Bell, a Black woman. L.A.-bred, but Seattle in spirit, L7 also predated the grunge explosion by several years, and with 1990’s Smell the Magic, they became the first all-woman band on Sub Pop’s roster. Where that record opened with a mission-statement declaration—“Get outta my way/Or I’m gonna shove”—that spoke to L7’s position as outsiders rattling the palace gates, their subsequent major-label debut, Bricks Are Heavy, showed what they were capable of when given the keys to the kingdom: proudly nasty but undeniably hooky hard-rock that fused classic punk and metal, like that photo of Debbie Harry and Lemmy come to life.
While grunge’s leading male lights often used their interviews or liner notes to support feminist and progressive causes, L7 treated each song as a megaphone, highlighting how pretty much everything that sucks about the world—from war to domestic abuse to conservative oppression to punker-than-thou scene-policing—is the product of ignorant, entitled men. Coming after L7 had co-founded the Rock for Choice concert series for abortion rights, Bricks Are Heavy was an emblem of grunge’s growing political influence, which continues to reverberate today: Once a revenge-fantasy anthem aimed at unspecified assholes, its signature rager “Shitlist” has been embraced by sexual-assault survivors in recent years as an effective strategy for seeking justice against abusers. –Stuart Berman
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Various Artists: Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1992)
There’s good timing, and then there’s Singles timing. Writer-director Cameron Crowe’s rom-com set in the Seattle music scene was filmed in the spring of 1991, before its parade of local-musician cameos (including Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell) had become household names. In the run-up to its fall 1992 release, the post-Nevermind wave was surging at full strength, and Epic Records made the unconventional decision to release the soundtrack a good three months before the film. The result was the closest thing this moment had to a Now That’s What I Call Grunge! compilation, replete with exclusive tracks—like a pair of top-notch Pearl Jam burners, Soundgarden’s monstrous “Birth Ritual,” and Mudhoney’s hype-deflating “Overblown”—at a time when demand for any new material by its constituent bands was at a frothy fever pitch.
Crowe’s curation also adds some important context to a movement that seemed to blow up out of nowhere, placing grunge on a Seattle-rock lineage that includes Jimi Hendrix and Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson, while tapping the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg for two winsome tunes that show the upstarts how an indie-rocker can age gracefully after the hysteria dies down. –Stuart Berman
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Sonic Youth: Dirty (1992)
Whether cutting split singles with Mudhoney, luring Nirvana from Sub Pop over to DGC Records, or taking those bands out on a legend-making European tour, Sonic Youth are arguably the most important grunge catalysts not from Washington State. And Dirty was their ultimate expression of Seattle fandom, the moment where the indie icons went from playing de facto A&R reps to putting on the knit hats and joining their younger disciples in the pit. The band’s catalog up to that point was hardly lacking for moments of pure, adrenalized exhilaration, but Dirty captures the sound of Sonic Youth rocking the fuck out with a muscular menace they’d never really exhibited before and never would again. But as much as it’s musically date-stamped to its era of origin, Dirty has proven to be a timeless record, its seething indictments of workplace sexual harrassment, gun violence, right-wing cruelty, and the ineffable shitiness of Clarence Thomas resounding loudly as ever. –Stuart Berman
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Babes in Toyland: Fontanelle (1992)
Formed in Minnesota, Babes in Toyland were a chimera of noise and grunge, led by the unadulterated and caustic sound of Kat Bjelland on vocals and guitar, with drummer Lori Barbero and bassist Maureen Herman lightly tempering her exorcisms. On stage, Bjelland would stand there with her face in rictus fury, becoming the very figure of torment and rage. (Kathleen Hanna called their live show “amazing, life-changing,” and part of the inspiration for forming Bikini Kill).
Their first record for Reprise, co-produced with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, took the galloping melodic hardcore of Hüsker Dü and backed you uncomfortably into a corner with it. One minute, Bjelland is lightly whimpering, “I want to live in the smallest corner,” the next she’s summoning a voice from the blackest chamber of her heart: “I vacuumed out my head/Jumping from bed to bed.” Fontenelle is soul and guts in equal measure. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Alice in Chains: Dirt (1992)
Unlike most of the bands on this list, Alice in Chains had no formal connections to the Sub Pop scene, or to punk rock in general: Their initial late-’80s incarnation, as Alice N’ Chains, saw frontman Layne Staley belting out funky glam-metal tunes with a sky-high hairdo to match. Even after guitarist Jerry Cantrell steered them to a tougher sound for their proper 1990 debut, Facelift, they were still touring with bands like Van Halen and Poison. But with their harrowing 1992 follow-up Dirt, Alice in Chains emerged as the quintessential Seattle band of the moment, blowing up grunge’s dread-ridden riffage and grey-skied mood to horror-movie proportions, while Staley provided documentarian dispatches from a worsening heroin addiction that exposed the dark side of life in America’s hippest city.
This is an album that opens with a pained cry of “owwwww,” and only gets more unforgiving from there. But Dirt’s most devastating quality lies in Staley and Cantrell’s haunted harmonies—beyond providing just enough melodic grace to send such a bleak album to the Top 10, they represent fading glimpses of the humanity that gets buried when you’re down in a hole. –Stuart Berman
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Nirvana: Incesticide (1992)
It may be one of the few albums revered as much for its liner notes as its music. Released a year and three months after Nevermind changed the molecular structure of rock’n’roll and made Nirvana rich beyond their dreams, this collection of early demos, covers, Sub Pop singles, and Peel Session recordings captured the prologue of Nirvana as lovers of noise, pop, and the underground scene. It was a self-administered (but lousily promoted) antidote to their sudden media attention, one that was meant to clarify their intentions, their politics, and their passions. It opens with one of the most important 7" records ever made, the canonical sloppy and poppy “Dive” b/w “Sliver,” and closes with “Aneurysm”—an absolutely perfect, blood-boiling, body-moving, and still severely underrated song.
And then there’s those apoplectic, last-word-in-the-argument liner notes. Long before the internet made lists of the best albums, Kurt Cobain gave the true fans a handful of artists who moved him, who inspired him. Scribble them on a piece of paper and bring them to the record store and check them out and get on their level: the Raincoats, Shonen Knife, Sonic Youth, Stinky Puffs, Jad Fair, the Wipers, Mazzy Star, Bjorn Again, T.V. Personalities. “At this point,” Cobain wrote at the end, “I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” This much was clear in 1992: If you weren’t into what Incesticide was offering, there’s the door. –Jeremy D. Larson
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PJ Harvey: Rid of Me (1993)
On Kurt Cobain’s famous hand-written list of his 50 favorite albums of all time, his most current entry was reserved for PJ Harvey’s 1992 debut, Dry. It’s easy to hear why the record scored an instant spot in his canon: With her predilection for no-frills production, dirge-blues squalor, and shrewd anti-patriarchy critique, the young Polly Harvey was the living embodiment of all that Cobain held dear on both a musical and socio-political level. (It’s no wonder they both looked to the same indie hardliner, Steve Albini, to record their respective post-breakthrough follow-ups.) But if Dry suggested Harvey and Cobain were kindred spirits, Rid of Me proved that her eponymous power trio was every bit Nirvana’s equal when it came to seismic quiet/LOUD eruptions and blood-letting lyricism. Framing its tales of murderous obsession, sexual domination, and literal gender-fucking with thundering jolts of junk-punk fury, Rid of Me ensured that Nirvana’s In Utero would be only the second-most ferocious grunge album of 1993. –Stuart Berman
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Melvins: Houdini (1993)
The musical equivalent of a steamroller paving over a pile of dinosaur bones, the Melvins were cited as a formative influence on Kurt Cobain so often, they probably should’ve received a cut of his royalties. As a consolation prize, the stoner-metal titans landed a deal with Atlantic on the back of Cobain’s endorsement, and the opportunity to have their famous friend produce their fifth album. Or at least that’s what the liner notes say: Though credited as a producer and player on a handful of tracks, Cobain was, by all accounts, too waylaid by his heroin addiction to be a functional collaborator. But the Melvins still made the most of the situation—Houdini reins in their sludgy sprawl for more focused blasts of fury that sound like vintage Metallica played at half-speed (which for the Melvins, was still plenty fast). And if Cobain wasn’t a fully present participant, you can still hear his disarming melodic sensibility seep into tracks like “Lizzy” and “Set Me Straight,” while a faithfully lumbering cover of Kiss’ “Goin’ Blind” makes a convincing case for that 1974 deep cut as the first-ever grunge song. The result of an uncompromising band finding itself on a major label and being produced by a rockstar pal too fucked up to do his job, Houdini is all the triumph and tragedy of the grunge saga condensed into a single record. –Stuart Berman
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Nirvana: In Utero (1993)
By 1993, Kurt Cobain was ailing from chronic stomach pain, exacerbated by a poor diet and his scoliosis, which he treated unsuccessfully with heroin. In February of that year, In Utero wasn’t so much made as it was purged from Nirvana’s digestive tract, tasting of copper and smelling of offal. Recorded live in a Minnesota studio by Steve Albini in a two-week sprint, the album was in exercise in rejection: of the glossy sound of Nevermind, of Nirvana’s sudden fame, of bodily organs, of life in general. Cobain sang about kissing open sores, eating cancer, anemia, milk, shit, umbilical nooses—an undigested litany that hints that his pain was much more of his body than in his mind. The singer’s vocal cords sound either lightly sandpapered or heavily scalpelled, recorded without any overdubs. He is alternately angry, sarcastic, spiritual, caustic, wearing his heart on his sleeve only because he’s turned his body inside out for all to see. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Redd Kross: Phaseshifter (1993)
As the CD-booklet spread for Phaseshifter makes clear, Redd Kross are the only band in the world who could corral Kim Gordon, the Minutemen’s Mike Watt, Black Flag’s Kira Roessler, and a thoroughly unenthused Gene Simmons for a backstage photo. It’s the perfect visual testament to the L.A. group’s penchant for inhabiting many different worlds simultaneously, through a discography that spans teenage-hardcore kicks, ’70s-rock raunch, and jangle-pop joy. On this album, brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald refashion themselves yet again as a bubblegrunge factory, pumping up the riffs into stage-dive-worthy strikes, but also heightening the sugar rush. Released just a few weeks after In Utero, Phaseshifter imagined an alternate post-success path for Nirvana, where Kurt Cobain was less concerned with scaring away the normies through Jesus Lizard-styled shock tactics, and instead channeled his songwriting gifts into crafting the alt-rock “Ticket to Ride.” –Stuart Berman
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Soundgarden: Superunknown (1994)
On Superunknown, Soundgarden mixed some pop vulnerability into their Zep-influenced hard rock and broke into the mainstream. The album is a grunge staple, but its pummeling riffs and Chris Cornell’s one-of-a-kind wail also transcended the genre’s power chords and raspy sneering. The anthemic melodies are juxtaposed with bleak themes of death, despondence, and apocalypse that feel even more devastating following Cornell’s 2017 suicide. The album remains an alt-rock anomaly, thundering and openhearted in equal measure. –Max Freedman
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Hole: Live Through This (1994)
In 1994, Courtney Love had a hell of a lot to be angry about: unrelenting abuse at the hands of the media and misogynist grunge fans; Child Protective Services’ brief seizure of her infant daughter; husband Kurt Cobain’s personal downward spiral, which ended with his suicide just days before the release of Live Through This, Hole’s second album. She channeled all this into a masterpiece of wrathful beauty—12 tracks bubbling over with poison-candy-apple hooks and some of the most deliciously melodic screams ever recorded. Raging against abusive lovers (“Violet”), victim-blaming (“Asking for It”), impossible beauty standards (“Miss World”), motherhood (“Plump”), and more, Love became an icon for the misfits, the survivors, and the fed-up. Live Through This broke the dam, flooding rock’n’roll with a strain of fury that flowed from riot grrrl to Alanis Morrissette to Paramore to Olivia Rodrigo and beyond. “Just you try to hold me down/Come on try to shut me up,” Love snarled on “Gutless.” Three decades later, nobody has been able to do either. –Amy Phillips
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7 Year Bitch: ¡Viva Zapata! (1994)
By 1994, whatever life left in grunge was balanced by how much death it had to contend with. ¡Viva Zapata!, the second album by Seattle punks 7 Year Bitch, was shrouded in sudden death: It was the first album the band made after the overdose of their lead guitarist Stefanie Sargent, and its title is in honor of Mia Zapata, the frontwoman of the Gits, who was raped and strangled to death on her way home from a bar. Selene Vigil’s blood-filled vocals of directly deal with Zapata’s murder on the breathtaking “M.I.A.,” a song that doesn’t subsume pain so much as try to make sure everyone knows exactly what pain is. ¡Viva Zapata! was a leap forward in performance and production, and the album’s best song, “The Scratch,” features dazzling interplay between the whole band, a whack-a-mole game of grunge guitar and melody. The way drummer Valerie Agnew counters Vigil when she sneers “I will have my cake and eat it too, just like you” captured 7 Year Bitch’s new chops, style, and attitude in just a few bars. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Stone Temple Pilots: Purple (1994)
Like the Greta Van Fleet of grunge, Stone Temple Pilots became one of most popular—and widely mocked—bands in America with their 1992 debut Core, which presented a Seattle-sound simulacrum that was so faithful, you could almost mistake them for a tribute act. But when follow-up Purple dropped in June 1994, STP no longer seemed on the outside of the scene—because there wasn’t much of a scene left to be ostracized from.
With Nirvana suddenly gone, Pearl Jam busy battling Ticketmaster, and Soundgarden off in their own lofty psychedelic art-rock orbit, STP were given a renewed sense of purpose: to crank out the quick-hit corkers that their progenitors could no longer provide, or no longer cared to. While full-throttled blitzes like “Unglued” and soaring, Vedder-ready anthems like “Big Empty” ably filled the void, Purple’s surprisingly melodic turns—like the yearning “Interstate Love Song” and the hypno-grooved “Vasoline”—revealed the secret sauce that allowed STP to rise above the shirtless throngs over the course of the ’90s: Behind the grungy facade, they were really alt-rock’s foremost power-pop band. –Stuart Berman
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Pearl Jam: Vitalogy (1994)
“Let the ocean swell, dissolve away my past,” Eddie Vedder sang on Vitalogy’s first song, a needling stomper called “Last Exit”—a fitting intro to a record that represented Pearl Jam’s offramp from Seattle hype, their generational spokesmodel duties, and the zeitgeist-shaping sound that made them famous. Where their first two records put them at the center of the grunge hurricane, Vitalogy was nothing less than an attempt to single-handedly change the weather. Recorded at a time when Pearl Jam was reeling from their pressure-cooker existence, Vitalogy is an endlessly fascinating portrait of a band teetering on the brink of collapse yet finding renewed inspiration in their most unrefined state, yielding a crazy-quilt sprawl that stretched out far enough to accommodate their “Nervous Breakdown” on one end and their “Revolution #9” at the other. In the thick of grunge’s ’91-’92 golden hour, it would’ve been hard to imagine that the deranged singer dangling upside-down from festival lighting rigs would, in just a few short years, be crooning about bugs over a wheezing accordion. But after all the drama, upheaval, and loss that Pearl Jam and their community had experienced in the preceding years, such unguarded moments were just Vedder’s new way of reassuring us that he was still alive. –Stuart Berman
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