10 Best Metal Albums Of The 90's

The 90's were known as a turbulent time for metal music. As the decade started off, the hair metal movement died a pretty blunt death at the hands of the alternative boom coming out of Seattle. At the same time, the titans of heavier genres like thrash metal were taking over the mainstream to fill the heavier void.

With the rock scene progressing by leaps and bounds, the metal sphere also opened up to include all different kinds of sounds from stoner metal to rap rock to industrial music. Even the more alternative-leaning bands were coming out with records that had a certain amount of heaviness in their song construction.

Gone were the paint-by-numbers party song construction of 80's metal. This decade helped reinvigorate the public's need for heavy music by providing watershed moments for the genre with every passing year. By the time the 2000's rolled around, metal had reinvented itself more than a couple of times, with albums that would soon become classics of the genre. While the start of the 90's signaled the end of some of metal's mainstay genres, the liveliness of the metal scene looked hopeful for the future by the decade's end.

At the end of the decade, the stoner rock genre had quickly rose to prominence, with bands like Sleep and Monster Magnet taking the metallic sludge of metal and combining it with hard rock flair. One of the leaders of the genre was the group Kyuss, who came out of the underground scene in the California desert.

After a few albums together, guitarist Joshua Homme felt that the music was getting stagnant in Kyuss and quickly left the band to start his own project. Teaming up with drummer Alfredo Hernandez, Homme ventured to Joshua Tree and began to carve out a new creative path for himself.

While later albums by Queens of the Stone Age are much more hard rock based, the band's 1998 debut is the closest thing to metal that the band had ever been. Trying to find an authentic sound, Homme tuned his guitar down to unheard-of levels and played through bass amps. This resulted in a broad sonic wall of guitar that poured across your eardrums on songs like "Mexicola" and "Regular John." With even bigger rock accolades just on the horizon, Queens of the Stone Age's debut is the sound of Joshua Homme at his most feral and raw.