10 Legendary Albums That Will Make You Love Grunge

One of the biggest crimes that you could have committed in grunge's heyday was try to be a rock star. The minute that kids saw Kurt Cobain's T-shirt in Rolling Stone saying that corporate magazines suck, it was time to drop all of the pretentions and start sounding a lot more real whenever you stepped up to the microphone. Billy Corgan had visions beyond just rock and roll though, and Siamese Dream is where we start to hear everything fall into place.

Though the Pumpkins have always been adjacent to the world of grunge rock, this is a nice way of getting people used to the sound of alternative who are already accustomed to classic rock. Framing the structure of this record more like a concept album, every single one of these tracks give a different side of what the Pumpkins can do, having the traditional grunge tropes on songs like Today and Cherub Rock while also having punk like aggression on Quiet.

Of all the releases coming out around the time of grunge though, the Pumpkins weren't afraid to get pretty either, and some of the best songs on this record are where they go for straight up ballads like on Disarm or the big soundscapes that they create on Soma and Mayonaise. This may have been just plain old rock and roll, but for the few minutes that you get listening to these songs, it feels like so much more.