10 Best Hard Rock Drummers Of The '90s
Mad rhythms in the age of irony.
The '90s were the decade where rock got its guts back. After years of putting rock music through different synthetic lenses and pop rock BS, the alternative boom and resurgence of heavy music put rock and roll back on the charts for the first time in a while.
You can have plenty of great riffs to tide you over, but if you want to have a great rock song on your hands, you have to build it from the backbeat outward.
As far back as the stone age of rock, the best rock songs in the world are made on the foundation of some of the greatest drummers in the world. However, there's a difference between playing too much for the song and actually laying into the groove.
Not only do these guys behind the skins know how to keep time, but they are able to sit in the song and deliver exactly what it needs, whether a firm head-banging swing or a performance that flies off the handle.
The drummer might get pegged as "the dumb one" in rock bands, but there's no way these songs would have been the same without these guys leading the charge.
This is where rock gets its muscle.
10. Brad Wilk - Rage Against the Machine
Hip hop is a genre that lives and dies on the rhythmic structure. Given its prior antecedents in funk and rock, the inner workings of a hip hop flow have to be perfectly in time if it wants to be taken seriously. While this sounds like a bit of an unorthodox way of talking about a rock band, the blunt force of something like Rage Against the Machine would not exist if not for Brad Wilk.
Across every one of these rap rock gods' classic albums, Wilk is the one guy who tends to get overshadowed the most. Then again, it's easy to not be seen when you have to compete with the militant voice of Zack de la Rocha and the mad scientific experiments coming whenever Tom Morello strapped on a guitar. Even with the odds stacked against him, Wilk's drumming was always what held the songs together, whether it was the unstoppable momentum of something like Bulls on Parade or leaning into the groove on Bombtrack.
The accolades don't stop there either, with Wilk's talents extending to the post Rage outfit Audioslave and even being called in to assist Black Sabbath on their final album 13. Though Zack de la Rocha may have been the unquestionable mouth of the band in the early days, he wouldn't have had a leg to stand on if Brad Wilk hadn't laid the groundwork.