10 Grunge Albums You Need To Hear Before You Die
7. Deep Six - Various
To put it mildly, the entire aesthetic and sound of grunge was a bit scatterbrained at the best of times. As much as acts like Soundgarden and Mudhoney belonged in the same category on paper, there's not too much connecting them from a sonic perspective except for the fact that they were both from Seattle. Though grunge doesn't have an overarching sound on one album, Deep Six is probably the closest thing we have to what the genre sounded like in the beginning.
Being a descendent of the independent marketing school of promotion, most of the grunge bands appeared on compilation records from indie labels like Sub Pop, which is where we get something like Deep Six. Aside from the thrown together nature of some of these compilations, this is where we get to see grunge at its earliest stages, as we hear bands like the Melvins and Malfunkshun turning in songs that have the signature sound of being halfway to classic rock and stoner metal.
Especially on the Melvins' songs, you can hear things getting into sharper focus, becoming a favorite band of Kurt Cobain and being the first wave of what we would later call grunge in the mid '80s. For as much as people like to nail down 1992 as the year where grunge became a thing, this one little album from 1986 might actually be Patient Zero.