10 Rock Bands That Invented Their Own Genre

There doesn't seem to be anything truly original across any genre of music. Everyone gets their rocks off somewhere, so you're bound to find some overlap with your personal favorite artists and the influences they pulled from as a budding songwriter. Every so often though, you get those few bands that seem to make music that's coming from another galaxy.

That's not to say that these bands designed to make a completely different genre of music. If you had asked them what they were about at the time, they would have told that they were taking inspiration from their rock and roll heroes and just building upon what they did. Time is the main test with these things though, and every new generation have taken the seeds of what was started here and blossomed out into something a lot more interesting, whether it's adding on new extensions or making it more accessible for the rest of the world.

Going through some of these records almost feels like watching the evolution of rock right before your ears, with techniques and songwriting that would have been unthinkable just a few years before. These acts may have gotten flak for going against the norm back in the day, but where's the fun in just sounding the same all the time? The music world is always changing, and it was about time to start going against the grain.

When the entire culture of rock started to change in the early '90s, most people pointed to Nirvana as the moment where everything reached a turning point. Since these were the first guys on MTV to be called pure grunge, it looked like they were the ones who got the entire ball rolling with this kind of music, right? As it turns out, years before Kurt Cobain started a moshpit in a gym, Buzz Osbourne already had his finger on pulse of grunge rock.

At the time that the Melvins were breaking onto the scene though, it was hard to even categorize the kind of music they were making. Though you had bits and pieces of weird musical artists like Frank Zappa in there, these guys loved their Sabbath records and weren't afraid to show it, with songs that were heavy as hell and also employing the drop D tuning to a lot of their guitars.

When you peel back the layers of some of these songs though, all the pieces of grunge rock are there, from the heavy as hell riffs to the vibe of the music that sounds like it's gurgling up from a murky swamp in the middle of the hinterland. In the coming years though, the Melvins continued to be ahead of the curve, almost setting the stage for stuff like stoner rock on the sludgier side of their catalog as well. The other bands in Seattle may have been more photogenic, but this is about as pure a grunge experience as you can find.