Beyond Nirvana: Grunge-Era Bands That Deserved Better
Here are some bands that the grunge explosion overlooked.
Grunge may be remembered as one of the defining musical genres of the 1990's, but most people are only familiar with the very surface of that scene. At the time, it was just part of a much wider and more vaguely defined underground rock music scene that was national and even global, descended from the punk and hardcore scenes but going beyond it. And when Nirvana's Nevermind kicked the doors open for grunge/punk-adjacent underground bands, the major labels went on a feeding frenzy upon the underground scene.
However, in the long run, the majority of the bands that built the wider scene actually didn't reap the benefits. The major labels cherry-picked the marketable acts and left the rest to rot. Some were from Seattle but predated the hype, some were thousands of miles away building parallel scenes, and some were just too raw for MTV.
In reality, "grunge" was simply a reductionist label given to a much broader, more vaguely defined, and more global underground movement that the music industry tried to package and sell. Here are seven bands that prove it.
Skin Yard
Active from 1985 to 1992, Skin Yard never broke through to mainstream audiences, and even today they're overlooked in grunge discussions.
Yet they have a legitimate claim to being the first grunge band. More importantly, their members built the Seattle scene that would later explode: bassist Daniel House owned the influential C/Z Records, guitarist Jack Endino engineered the raw grunge sound (producing Nirvana's Bleach, Soundgarden's Screaming Life, and early Mudhoney), original drummer Matt Cameron went on to Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, and later drummer Barrett Martin played with Screaming Trees.
Skin Yard weren't just part of the scene -- they were the scene.
"Hallowed Ground" (from Hallowed Ground, Toxic Shock Records, 1988)
Tad
This band formed in 1988 right as the Seattle scene was exploding, and they got serious buzz in the underground alongside Mudhoney and Nirvana. And with good reason: they were arguably the heaviest and noisiest of the early Sub Pop bands, combining old-school heavy metal with then-newer noise rock -- imagine Black Sabbath and Big Black being tossed into a blender.
Unfortunately, for that very same reason, they were overlooked when grunge went mainstream. By the time they signed to Giant Records in 1993, the moment had passed, and a publicity controversy (a poster featuring Bill Clinton smoking weed) got them dropped almost immediately. But they remain one of the most potent bands to come out of the original grunge scene.
8-Way Santa (full album, Sub Pop Records, 1991)
L7
Before Seattle stared getting all the attention, L7 were wreaking havoc down in L.A. with a vicious blend of punk rock and metal that predated the whole grunge explosion. Led by guitarists Donita Sparks and Suzi Gardner, they were one of the heaviest, rawest, and most confrontational bands of the era.
After releasing their self-titled debut on Epitaph Records in 1987, they moved on to Sub Pop and released the 1990 album Smell the Magic, which featured "Shove," a song that should be required listening for anyone who thinks they know what grunge sounds like. In 1991, they founded Rock for Choice, a series of pro-choice benefit concerts that helped inspire the emerging "riot grrrl" movement -- though L7 themselves resisted the label, preferring to be judged as a band rather than as women in rock.
They eventually signed to Slash Records and released Bricks Are Heavy in 1992, which spawned the alternative radio hit "Pretend We're Dead" and landed them on MTV. But L7's uncompromising music, along with some of their antics -- such as their notorious 1992 Reading Festival performance, where Sparks threw a used tampon into the mud-slinging crowd -- ensured that they would be cult heroes rather than mainstream rock stars.
"Shove" (from Smell The Magic, Sub Pop Records, 1990)
Babes in Toyland
L7 weren't the only all-female band during this time to raise holy hell with a rock'n'roll racket. Halfway across the country, Minneapolis had its own answer to grunge with the trio Babes in Toyland.
Fronted by guitarist/vocalist Kat Bjelland, they were as abrasive and confrontational as anything from the Pacific Northwest. Their debut album Spanking Machine (1990) was produced by Jack Endino at Reciprocal Recording in Seattle, giving them instant grunge cred, but their sound was rooted in Midwest punk bands like Cows and influenced by the tight-knit Minneapolis scene. Like L7, they were often lumped in with riot grrrl but rejected the label as they preferred to be seen as a rock band rather than defined by gender.
They were among the first alternative bands to sign to a major label (Reprise/Warner Bros.), but by 1995's Nemesisters, the grunge wave had crashed and the band faded from view. They deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as Nirvana and Soundgarden, but various factors -- whether it be geography, timing, gender, refusal to compromise musically -- conspired against them.
"He's My Thing" (from Spanking Machine, Twin/Tone Records, 1990)
Cosmic Psychos
From halfway across the country from Seattle, let's now go all the way to the other side of the planet to Melbourne, Australia, home of the grunge/punk trio Cosmic Psychos. Formed in 1982, they released their debut EP Down on the Farm in 1985, and since then they've been steadily churning out stripped-down tunes influenced equally by the Stooges, Ramones, American hardcore and Aussie pub rock. Not only did they predate the Seattle grunge explosion by several years, but they also significantly influenced it. Kurt Cobain cited them as a direct influence, kept their albums in his personal collection, and famously wore their T-shirts.
They never got swept up in the major-label feeding frenzy on the alternative rock scene in the '90s, and they never really stopped playing either. And as of this writing, they still haven't, as their most recent album I Really Like Beer just dropped last fall.
"Lost Cause" (from Go The Hack, Survival Records, 1989)
The Hard-Ons
Cosmic Psychos weren't the only ones tearing it up south of the equator, though. To the north, in the suburbs of Sydney, were the Hard-Ons. But they're somewhat of an outlier here, for a couple of reasons. The first is their multicultural lineup: they featured a Sri Lanka native (drummer/singer Keish de Silva) and a member of Korean descent (bassist Ray Ahn) at a time when it was extremely rare for anyone of East or South Asian descent to play in an Anglosphere punk rock band.
The second reason, and what really made them stand out, is that they're more melodic than most bands discussed here. The Hard-Ons specialized in fast, hook-packed songs that split the difference between Ramones-style punk and classic ’70s power pop, cramming massive choruses into two-minute blasts without losing any speed or aggression. They became local legends in Oz before American underground audiences caught on, eventually collaborating with such US punk legends as Henry Rollins and Poison Idea's Jerry A.
"Crazy Crazy Eyes" (from Too Far Gone, Waterfront Records, 1993)
Union Carbide Productions
It's a long way from Australia to Sweden, but that's where we're headed for our next feature band: the miscreants known as Union Carbide Productions. Nobody has ever considered them grunge, and they likely wouldn’t have appreciated the label anyway. But if they’d formed in Seattle instead of Gothenburg, they would almost certainly have been branded with the dreaded scarlet letter “G.”
Union Carbide Productions sat in a unique space between post-hardcore, noise rock, and garage rock that predated grunge. They were far more volatile and confrontational than anything that would later pass for mainstream alternative rock -- jagged, noisy, and unhinged, driven by elastic basslines, fractured guitars, and barely contained chaos.
Several of its members would later form The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, who found mainstream success in Sweden. But Union Carbide Productions were something else entirely -- raw, dangerous, and proudly uncommercial.
"Cartoon Animal" (from In The Air Tonight, Radium 226.05 Records, 1987)