10 Rock Bands That Made Metal Songs

Pearl Jam never really envisioned their band to take off overnight. If you go back and listen to what kind of songs they were playing during the making of the album Ten, they have said that they just wanted to put some songs out there to have a good excuse to actually go out on the road. Once the mainstream rock fans came in, they had a bit of a chip on the shoulder and needed to get the lead out in some way.

While Vs. is by no means a metal record from skin to core, you can hear different elements of heavy music creeping into the mix, like the snarling riff that opens up the record on the song Go or the almost funk metal leanings of a track like Blood. If you want a no-BS throwdown, Animal has got you covered, taking the same heavy sound that you heard on Ten and giving it that much more muscle, almost like if a song like Even Flow had gotten some real teeth behind it.

If you look at the actual riff itself, the whole thing is a lot more menacing, almost sounding like what a song like Enter Sandman could be if it were being reinterpreted by a punk band. They weren't messing around with this song either, debuting it at the MTV Awards and leaving the crowd stunned once the performance was over. As much as Pearl Jam needed to get all of that energy out, they may have accidentally rediscovered the hidden metal band that they had inside them all along.