10 Perfect Alternative Albums That Deserve A Lot More Love

2. Black Gives Way to Blue - Alice in Chains

It was going to take a miracle for us to see any new Alice in Chains music past the year 2002. Since Layne Staley's death, there was no way that anyone was going to be able to fill his shoes, tapping into that kind of pain that we all knew too well. Alice was always about more than just Layne, and Jerry Cantrell managed to give a second life to the project in the late '00s.

Drafting in Comes With the Fall singer William DuVall, Black Gives Way to Blue really feels like a band reborn, almost as if Jerry has been sitting on these riffs for Alice songs for years and just decided to put them out. This isn't a case of them lightening up with age, with the album opening on All Secrets Known directly confronting the band's fallout in the past few years. Over the course of this record, everything still feels distinctively Alice, mixing in the bangers like Check My Brain with acoustic material like When the Sun Rose Again.

DuVall is far from just a hired gun too, having a much more punk background and letting his pipes soar on Last of My Kind while also blending with Jerry's harmonies perfectly. Compared to the other bands that try to make a dramatic return to roots, this is the textbook example of how to do a comeback correctly. No BS, no nostalgia trips, just cutting to the chase and coming up with killer tunes.