10 Most Underrated Rock Albums Of The 90s

So many events happened in the '90s that it was easy to get lost in the shuffle. For perspective, in just a few years, we went through the downfall of hair metal, the grunge explosion, the pop punk revival, the jam band scene, Britpop, and the beginnings of nu metal in one go. With all that to worry about, it's no wonder that people tended to gloss over some of the best of the bunch.

It's not like these albums are going to give stuff like Nirvana's Nevermind a run for its money though. Some of these albums are a little bit on the fringes because of how different they seemed to the public at the time. Different doesn't always mean bad though, and these records proved to be pretty influential when the new school of rock started to pay attention. Whether it's because of the wild experiments that they did or just the way they were able to change with the times, these are the records that take a lot more chances than you probably remember.

Any band can find themselves writing the same kind of song over and over again, but it takes guts to pull something like this off, and even crazier when they're able to make it work. If you're looking to understand what the '90s were really like, don't just look at the famous stuff. Look at the music in between the cracks.

After the grunge melodrama faded from memory, Green Day had become one of the next big voices of rock with Dookie. Any other band that has a record with that much star power and timeless songs would probably just want to milk the formula for all it's worth, right? Not necessarily. When it came to the next album, Green Day got to the studio with a definite axe to grind on Insomniac.

Right as Dookie started to blow up, the band's original fanbase in California started to call them sellouts and openly boycotted them appearing at any of the local shows. You can really hear that frustration of staying a true punk band on this album, especially with the guitars sounding a lot more crunchy than most were probably expecting out of the guys who wrote songs like When I Come Around.

The topics on here are a lot darker as well, talking about addiction to crystal meth on Geek Stink Breath and also confronting the fan discourse on the song 86. There are also a few more twists and turns in the instrumentals, from Mike Dirnt's precision and stamina opening Panic Song and toying around with connecting songs on Brain Stew and Jaded. You can call what Green Day was doing pop punk, but don't you dare forget that they are still focused on the punk side of that conversation.