10 Perfect Debut Rock Albums Of The 90s

When the clock hit midnight on January 1st 1990, the '80s had really started to overstay their welcome. The neon colored gloss of the previous decade was getting a bit too much to take in and the sounds of genres like hair metal were starting to get a little too silly to take seriously anymore. The rock scene needed some new blood, and the decade delivered with some of the biggest albums in history.

Once the alternative movement started to kick into high gear, some bands made it their calling card to make music that was outside of the parameters of what we were used to, giving way to completely new genres of music that no one had ever heard before. Instead of relying on sounds that they knew worked, these albums turned the entire scene inside out and would eventually lead to millions of copycats trying to compete in their wake.

As the decade started to fade away into the next millennium, not an ounce of sheen was lost on these records, with most of the tracks still sounding like the future of music to this day. It's always important to leave a good first impression, but these songs were enough to sustain any other band's entire career.

After Kurt Cobain's tragic passing, it felt like every music fan got the wind knocked out of them. Since the leader of this generation of music was suddenly gone, it would have been completely understandable if the rest of the band retired from music altogether. When Dave Grohl came out of his funk though, he managed to find his way back from the brink with a band of his own...kind of.

Going into recording the Foo Fighters debut record, Dave didn't intend for it to actually be a full band project, since most of the songs were just sketches that he made in his Nirvana days. Choosing to record at a studio a few blocks away from his house, most of this record is just Dave making some of his songs and seeing where things go...and what he ended up with was the foundation of his second act.

Once tracks like I'll Stick Around and Big Me began to pick up steam, Grohl assembled a band behind him and kept on carrying on as the frontman, with a sound that had the same aggression as Nirvana but with a much more optimistic attitude. Now that the post grunge movement was about to kick into high gear, it's only natural that the beating heart behind Nirvana showed us the way forward.