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Hard Rock Bands Of The 90s – Otherwise in the rock sphere, especially not metal. Although Nirvana and others pushed the ’90s Seattle alt-rock buzz to ubiquity, many a metal band formed in the previous decade was just getting started.
The oft-repeated story is that Nirvana’s breakthrough single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and its parent album, Nevermind — released back-to-back in September 1991 — signaled the death knell for metal, especially the hair metal that spent the ’80s the fire. Hollywood’s Sunset Strip.
Hard Rock Bands Of The 90s
There is some truth to that story, but the view is actually more from a music industry perspective than a listener’s.
Fan Poll: 5 Greatest Metal Bands Of The 90s
Record executives chased the latest trend, which by 1992 was all-out grunge, signing Nirvana soundalikes to try and capitalize. Maybe listeners who just toed the company’s line were done with metal, but it’s not like it suddenly stopped being popular.
, should be enough to dispel any notion that metal has gone silent. But hey, we’re here all day. Other bands that started in the 80s but made their biggest hits in the 90s include artists in death metal (Cannibal Corpse) and thrash (Slayer), alt-metal (Deftones) and groove (Sepultura).
So what do you think? Did grunge end metal’s dominance in the 90s? Or was it all just marketing hype? Can you think of any ’80s metal bands that flourished in the ’90s? See 10 examples below.
Grunge didn’t kill everything. Scroll down to see some 1980s metal bands that took off in the ’90s despite the rise of grunge and alternative rock.
Best Grunge Bands
Filed under: Cannibal Corpse, Danzig, Deftones, Dream Theatre, Loud Lists, Megadeth, Metallica, Pantera, Sepultura, Slayer, Type O NegativeOne popular narrative about the nineties is that grunge invaded and killed heavy metal. And certainly, Nirvana and the alt-rock revolution that followed them did nothing good for the hair metal and thrash scenes that had swelled throughout the previous decade.
That said, depending on how you looked at them, more than a few “grunge” bands were pretty damn metal (Alice in Chains, anyone?), and a whole slew of highly innovative and influential bands (see the whole classic Roadrunner list) arose to redefine and keep alive the sound of heavy music in those years. Indeed, the Nineties even saw the birth of a hugely popular, but also hugely polarizing, new style of heaviness: nu-metal.
So if grunge didn’t kill metal in the nineties at all, what was the single biggest metal band of the decade? We asked you, and you responded in droves. Below are the top five vote getters.
It’s not hard to see why Korn came so high in this poll: When the Bakersfield crew came out of the gate, few listeners were ready (see what we did there?) for the fresh and funky yet raw and crushing sounds they would bring to a massive audience.
The 20 Greatest Hair Metal Bands Of All Time
For better or worse, nu-metal came to define much of the nineties, and as a result, a landslide of bands with baggy pants, dreadlocks, and detuned seven-string guitars followed in Jonathan Davis and Co. the early Aughts.
Korn has been a true cultural force to be reckoned with, which makes it no surprise that fans have supported them throughout the years.
Tool may be considered one of the greatest bands of the nineties, but it certainly lacks the fervor with which their fans tempered every detail about the band’s movements, both inside and outside the band itself.
, they grabbed a generation of rockers by the collar, creating a lifelong legion of worshipers—die-hards who only grew more fanatical as the band’s songs grew longer, denser, and more mathematical over the following decades.
The New Wave Of Classic Rock: 15 Guitar Bands You Need To Know About
Without the profound influence of Chuck Schuldiner and the sharp demands he placed on the rotating group of musicians who joined him in his band, the face of death metal (especially of the Floridian variety) would look very different.
Although Death, like many on this list, got their start in the 1980s, the Nineties were the fertile breeding ground where death metal’s greatest talents truly exploded, Schuldiner included. His tragically early passing in 2001 after a long battle with cancer cut his story short, leaving his brightest, most complex work of the previous decade and forever crowning him a king of 1990s metal.
Sepultura may have gotten their start back in 1984, but it was during the Brazilian metal pioneers’ evolution through the nineties from death to thrash and the tribal-nu-metal-inflected heaviness of
Songs like “Roots Bloody Roots” and “Attitude,” from that last record, as well as classic tracks from its groove-laden predecessor
Best Nu Metal Songs, Ranked
Is it any surprise that fans overwhelmingly voted the Texan metal lords into the #1 spot here?
After cutting their teeth as a hair-metal act in the eighties, the band enlisted a NOLA-bred singer named Philip Anselmo and fired with
. Indeed, each successive album felt like Pantera had gotten heavier in some way, while still expanding their musicianship and experimentation.
Metal didn’t get any better than Pantera for our readers in the nineties, and it’s no wonder that even after the untimely deaths of the band’s founding brothers, Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul, the band is still impossibly big. Heavy Metal has existed as a musical force and genre of rock music for the last four decades. Some might argue that the glorious heyday of the 80s and 90s heavy metal music scene cannot be replicated. But others may beg to differ. And as a sign of fan demand, perhaps, or a last-ditch effort to cash in on the perfect moment when fans are curiously brewing with nostalgia, many bands, both punk and metal, have reunited their former band members (or new ones) and performing, and in some cases re-recording music. Such notable examples include Refused, At the Gates, Dark Angel, Faith No More and many others. But, we now present our list of 10 metal bands who wish they could reunite.
Best Rock Bands Of All Time
Kyuss may have been the best of the desert rock stoner bands from the SoCal desert regions. With massive, fuzzy riffs and polarizing drum beats that stung, the band was definitely destined to be bigger before they called it quits in 1995, and members Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri went on to form the hugely successful Queens of the Stone Age. to establish. But alas, Kyuss reunion is almost literally impossible, as Homme sued the members when they tried to use the moniker Kyuss Lives in 2012.
This hair metal group rose to fame in the late 80s, with the help of the excellent vocals of singer Sebastian Bach. With looks, hair, a great vocal range, and a bit of an attitude, this singer led the New Jersey-based metal band throughout the late ’90s. With anthems such as “Youth Gone Wild”, “18 to Life” and “Slave to the Grind”, it was this classic series that most fans remember, despite the bands split from Bach and the addition of singer Tony Harnell from the band TNT. Both Skid Row and Bach went on to have formidable solo careers, but the nostalgia for a Skid Row reunion can always be a problem for both band and former singer.
This is an extreme metal band that is often underestimated. Pioneers of experimental death metal grindcore, this band rose from the swamps of Louisiana to gain a following in the NOLA metal and punk scene. The band had numerous line-up changes during its short years together between 1991 and 1997, but included future Goatwhore guitarist Sammy Duet, and singer Dax Riggs. Mixing grindcore with everything from black and doom to country and even folk, the madness, speed and tempo changes made the music as eclectic as it was morbid. Unfortunately, when bassist Audie Pitre died in a DUI accident in 1997, the band broke up. Known as a cult band, the bands music was ahead of its time and influenced tons of NOLA bands like early NIN, Pantera, Down, Warbeast, Crowbar, Goatwhore, Superjoint Ritual and more, as well as many and death metal, stoner metal and even punk bands.
Formed on the East Coast in the early 1980s, Queensryche built a foundation in early heavy metal with progressive rock and classic to create a version of power metal/prog rock to win over hordes of fans with an enormously larger than the life sound. Originally, the group’s lineup (and some might say the best) consisted of singer Geoff Tate, bassist Eddie Jackson, drummer Scott Rockenfield, and guitarists Chris DeGarmo and Michael Wilton. The group’s most successful and important album to date was created with this series.
All Female Death Metal Band Kittie In The Late ’90s
Was a dystopian rock opera, a musical oddity that fans loved, that became a phenomenal hit. But today, Tate is no longer with the group, as many recent lawsuits and court case settlements have only given him rights to tertiary songs from the
(1991) album. Although many reunions and even follow-ups to the famous album, today, the group (with new singer Todd La Torre), and Tate (with a solo career) have moved on with new music, but the music of Queensryche and the classic line-up will remain on record forever.
As part of the initial wave of blasphemous Norwegian black metal, Immortal was a band that stood out
