10 Perfect Albums That Will Make You Love Grunge Music

At the start of the ‘90s, rock was in dire need of some sort of change. As the hair metal bands started to really scrape the bottom of the barrel, the entire MTV generation started to look way too plastic, with everyone tuning into the latest pin up stars that you were being told to love day after day. Rock needed to get in touch with its roots again, and all of the attention suddenly shifted to a stormy city in the Pacific Northwest.

Just north of the Sunset Strip, Seattle gave way to a new era of rock and roll with grunge, with songs that hit a lot closer to the bone than what you saw from the likes of Warrant. While the heart of rock and roll was still here, these songs were not always for the faint of heart either, dealing with fairly difficult subjects and getting in touch with the more emotional side of the music. There may have been a lot of angst to go around at the time, but there was also a little something for everyone in Seattle.

These might all be grunge, but not many of them sound the same either, taking the building blocks of loud guitars and emotional vocals and taking them in every direction, from heavy metal to the classic mold of rock bands to the eventual sounds that would come to be known as modern rock. Rock had been given an ‘80s makeover, and we needed a reminder of what we were all about.

If you were talk to any grunge purist, most of the greatest music to come out of the scene had to be released by 1994. The minute that word got out that Kurt Cobain had killed himself, much of the Seattle scene really had the wind knocked out of them, with bands either breaking up or going through some of the biggest slumps in their catalog. If there was one guy who could have steered us past that though, it was going to be Dave Grohl.

After getting himself out of his personal funk of having Nirvana's future abruptly end, the Foo Fighters wasn't even meant to be a mainstream project, just being the product of Dave hanging out in a studio every now and again and recording some of the songs that he was working on on his own. While no one was expecting Kurt Cobain levels of songwriting or anything, the first Foos project is about as compact a listen as any other grunge record, sounding rough around the edges and even sprinkling in some other influences like metal on Weenie Beenie or Beatles flavored pop on Big Me.

You can definitely hear the seeds of the In Utero era still in some of these songs, but Dave wasn't looking to just make a band that would be similar to Nirvana. This was a shot of life for the rest of the genre, and it gave most of us hope that the sounds of Seattle might be able to thrive even without the voice of a generation with us anymore.