10 Underrated Hard Rock Albums Of The '90s

6. Louder Than Love - Soundgarden

It's strange to consider that Soundgarden was one of the late bloomers to the mainstream grunge scene. While they had been mainstays of the genre in Seattle since the late '80s, it wasn't until Superunknown that people really started to pay attention, with Black Hole Sun catapulting them into superstardom. Even if that record shows the pop-friendly version of Soundgarden, Louder than Love is where things started to get really fascinating.

Coming off of their impressive debut Ultramega Ok, this is where these guys really started to find their footing as a hard rock band. From the word go, songs like Hands All Over and Gun are some of the trippiest songs to come from the grunge scene at that point, as the group experiments with weird tunings and wild time signature changes, making you unsure of where the beat is from one phrase to the other.

Despite wielding a guitar for most of the group's later output, this is where Chris Cornell also fully settles into the role of being a frontman, as he shrieks his lungs out on songs like the (sorta?) title track Loud Love. That's not to say they had lost their punk edge either, with Big Dumb Sex being a pastiche of the dumber trends going on in hair metal at the time. Even though we were still a long way from the big time, Louder Than Love was where Soundgarden started to sound much more eclectic than anyone had ever imagined.