10 Greatest Hard Rock Songs Of The 1990s
Alt Rock's Anger.
The hard rock world was definitely dealt a heavy blow with the rise of the alternative movement. Although some of the bands of the time did have some hard rock tendencies in between their songs, not every band could be what you'd normally think of as edgy. That's not to say that hard rock didn't have its fair share of decent moments.
The rock landscape never changes overnight, and the music scene was still more than hungry for some sludgy riffs and the occasional metallic guitar sounds that could get you to bang your head all night long. Now that the rock landscape had a new look though, being a hard rock song could come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes you'd see songs that were filtered through the lens of punk rock, while you also had the thrash metal movement still showing its colors at the very start of the decade.
Aside from the more obvious picks though, there were also some people that you wouldn't necessarily consider to be rock throwing their hats into the ring and coming away with some of the most legendary songs of the era. For an era that was primarily focused on playing from the heart, there were still some serious strokes of genius to be found along the way.
10. Thunderstruck - AC/DC
You don't really expect a band like AC/DC to really switch up their style all that often. Ever since reinventing themselves with a new singer on Back In Black, every other album feels like they were trying to recapture the same sort of magic. Every so often though, you get that one song that manages to get that same swagger all over again.
Arriving just before the waves of grunge really hit, the sound of Thunderstruck's opening lick was enough to get any wannabe rock fan into the genre on its own. From the opening notes, it practically feels like you're listening to the seconds before a musical bomb goes off, which gets even more exciting when the drums actually kick in. After all those years, Brian Johnson is still sounding as raw and ruthless as ever as well, with some of the best screams that he ever put onto a record at that point.
It's not like this was going to revolutionize the rock world overnight or anything. This was just the same kind of music that AC/DC was churning out, only with a lot more urgency this time around. Not all of the greatest rock songs in the world have to reinvent the wheel though. Sometimes that feeling of adrenaline is enough. There's no need to overanalyze a song like this here. It rocked...end of story.