10 Scariest Albums Ever Made
6. Dirt - Alice in Chains
The grunge scene wasn't necessarily known for being scary. While bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were known to dip their toes into more serious subject matter from time to time, the impact always felt more jarring than anything outright scary. However, Alice in Chains emerged from the shadows with one of the most unsettling meditations on drug addiction.
Written while the band were battling their struggles with narcotics, the material on Dirt was a way for them to exorcize their demons from themselves. Though there might not be anything inherently scary on something like "Would?," it ends up looking a lot more serious when you take into account the state of the band at this point.
Whereas some songs like "Dam That River" could be a standard hard rock tune, something like "Angry Chair" gives off the feeling of crawling through mud in the bowels of Hell, with no hope for survival.
Even the songs that aren't about drug use like "Rooster" are absolutely haunting in their presentation, with each guitar stab sounding like it's willingly dragging you into the inferno below. Dirt ended up being the band's creative peak, but it wasn't enough to save some of them from their demons, with Layne Staley succumbing to heroin addiction in 2002.
Alice in Chains might not have aimed to be the darkest metal band in the world, but the real stories behind these songs took them from amazing to genuinely terrifying.