10 Genuinely Perfect Grunge Songs, Ranked

Rock music has gone through several phases. The 1960s Brit rock wave gave way to a harder sound in the 1970s. In the 80s, hair bands ruled the radio. The 2000s saw the re-emergence of stripped-down garage rock. Today, who knows what rock really is in this era of social media. In the late 1980s and through the middle of the 1990s, however, what listeners wanted was clear. The grunge sound came out of the rain and muck of Seattle and took over everywhere. Any rock fan knows about the huge hits, like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun”, but there are a plethora of flannel-clad classics out there. These 10 grunge songs are as good as it gets.

10

“Touch Me I’m Sick” by Mudhoney (1988)

Grunge didn’t begin in 1991. That’s just the year it exploded into the mainstream. Mudhoney, unfortunately, never got as big as other bands, but what they accomplished in the late 80s set the stage for what was to come. Their first album, 1988’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, is a sonic blast of indie rock. Their big single, “Touch Me I’m Sick,” is short, but makes the most out of its less than three minutes with an intense energy. Mark Arm‘s gravelly wail rips across your speakers as he sings about how low a man can go and the pain he can put on someone else.

9

“Plush” by Stone Temple Pilots (1993)

Stone Temple Pilots are disregarded by the former cool kids who would like to tell you that they’re not truly grunge. Just because STP was from California doesn’t mean they were copycats. Stone Temple Pilots perfected the grunge sound and were one of the most popular bands of the era. “Plush,” the second single from their debut album, Core, is carried by Dean DeLeo‘s guitar, but Scott Weiland was the star. His deep voice is instantly recognizable as he sings about the painful end of a relationship wrapped up in a story of a woman gone missing.

8

“I Nearly Lost You” by Screaming Trees (1992)

Grunge was so huge by 1992 that it was even taking over the movies too. Cameron Crowe‘s Singles has one of the best soundtracks you’ll ever hear, and it includes the masterpiece “I Nearly Lost You” by Screaming Trees. Like Mudhoney, they never quite broke through to the masses, but this song lives on forever. Lead singer Mark Lanegan’s deep baritone voice can’t be matched. He’s his own instrument, with words so filled with soul that “I Nearly Lost You” sounds like the blues, a bygone psychedelic era, and grunge mashed together into something beautiful.

7

“Doll Parts” by Hole (1994)

Think what you want about Courtney Love, it doesn’t diminish her greatness. Her band, Hole, was never bigger than they were in 1994. It was a year of tremendous success and the deepest pain for Hole. On April 5, her husband, Kurt Cobain, took his own life. Just days later, Hole’s best album, fittingly titled Live Through This, was released. The second single, “Doll Parts,” is a slow-motion heartbreaker. In it, Love tells the listener that one day they’ll ache like she does. At the end, she screams it, a woman begging to be heard as her world crumbles.

6

“I Don’t Know Anything” by Mad Season (1995)

The grunge supergroup Mad Season was made up of Layne Staley from Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam‘s Mike McCready, Screaming Trees‘ Barrett Martin, and John Baker Saunders from The Walkabouts. They only released one album, 1995’s Above, in a year when grunge was already declared dead. It wasn’t. While the song “River of Deceit” gets the most attention, let’s give some much-needed love to “I Don’t Know Anything.” Over the crunch of a sick guitar riff and smashing drums, Staley hypnotizes through repetition, over and over admitting “I don’t know anything.”

5

“Say Hello 2 Heaven” by Temple of the Dog (1991)

The best of the grunge supergroups was Temple of the Dog. Founded as a tribute to Andrew Wood, the late singer of Mother Love Bone, the one album brought together the remaining members of the future Pearl Jam with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, and on a few songs, the mainstream debut of Eddie Vedder. If “Hunger Strike” was on this list, it could easily be at number one, but let’s not dismiss the brilliance of “Say Hello 2 Heaven.” In it, Cornell gives a touching goodbye to Wood. Grunge is often dark. This song proves that the darkness can heal too.

4

“Nutshell” by Alice in Chains (1994)

Alice in Chain’s saddest song, “Nutshell,” was released on their 1994 EP Jar of Flies. Knowing that Layne Staley was crumbling under the weight of addiction, and that in a few short years he’d disappear until his 2002 death, makes this song impossible to listen to without your throat tightening up and tears coming to your eyes. Staley seems to have given up as he sings about fighting a battle all alone and having no place to call home. For an added dimension, check out the 1996 MTV Unplugged version. In his last ever show with Alice in Chains, a frail Staley found his voice as the rest of him was slowly fading away.

3

“Fell on Black Days” by Soundgarden (1994)

Soundgarden was there since the beginning of grunge. They got even bigger in 1991, before ruling rock in 1994 thanks to their chart-topping album Superunknown. While “Black Hole Sun” took them to a new level of fame, the last single, “Fell on Black Days,” is its own tremendous gift to the genre. Chris Cornell begins the song with an admission that fame is what he fears, and now that it’s here, he doesn’t know how to enjoy it and be happy. Depression has its hold and won’t let go as he repeats the refrain of “How would I know that this could be my fate?”

2

“Black” by Pearl Jam (1991)

Pearl Jam‘s debut album, Ten, was everywhere in 1991, with several singles still all over rock radio today. Although never released as a single, “Black” is so good that it broke through anyway. Over a slow, therapeutic beat, Eddie Vedder takes over the ballad with his distinct vocals. It’s an unforgettable breakup song, as Vedder is overtaken by the remorse of a relationship coming to an end. He knows he needs to let go, but the last lines say it all. “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life, I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky, but why, why, why can’t it be, can’t it be mine?”

1

“Drain You” by Nirvana (1991)

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is without a doubt the biggest grunge song of all-time. Heck, it’s one of the biggest rock songs in general. Kurt Cobain hated it though. When asked what his favorite Nirvana song was, he named “Drain You.” Lost in the number of huge singles off of Nevermind, “Drain You” is about an all-consuming relationship, carried by brilliant lyrics such as the opening lines of “One baby says to another, ‘I’m lucky to’ve met you, I don’t care what you think unless it is about me.” For proof of how much Cobain loved it, check out this 1994 live performance. In the last weeks of his life, Cobain’s guitar goes silent. Frustrated, he throws it to the side, and after the wind up of Dave Grohl‘s drums, emits a scream for the ages.

Four icons, four completely different ways of being trouble. Here is the
one who would pick up the phone, what a friendship with them would look like, and why punk needed
every single one of them.

You get the friend with no sense of self preservation and the
best instincts in the room. Iggy invented most of what a frontman does by throwing himself
off things in front of people who had come to see somebody else.

• You say yes first and work out the details later, which is either the best or the worst
  thing about you depending on the week.
• The Stooges were commercially ignored for years and then turned out to have invented
  punk before punk had a name.
• He is also far funnier and far smarter than the shirtless legend suggests, which is the
  part people who know him always mention first.
• A night with this friend goes badly wrong at some point and becomes the story you tell
  for the next twenty years.

You get the loyal one, which in punk terms means the one who will
stand in front of you and not explain herself afterwards. Joan has never once asked
permission for anything, and she would not expect you to either.

• Your loyalty is the loud kind, and anybody who has been on the wrong side of it knows
  about it.
• Every label turned down her biggest single, so she started her own and put it out
  herself, which remains one of the great told-you-so stories in music.
• She joined the Runaways at fifteen and has been doing the same job, on her own terms,
  ever since.
• This is the friend who gets you into the venue, and you never find out how.

You get the gentlest person in the whole scene, which is the
thing nobody expects from the band that made everything faster. Joey was shy, kind and
slightly awkward, and he fronted the most influential punk band there has ever been.

• You are the calm one in a loud group, and people tell you things they do not tell
  anybody else.
• The Ramones played for more than twenty years, influenced almost every band that
  followed and never had a hit single.
• Their whole idea was that anybody could do this, which is the most generous thing a
  famous band has ever said out loud.
• He died in 2001, and the corner of East 2nd Street in Manhattan is named after him,
  which is about as New York as a tribute gets.

You get the strange one, the friend who turns an ordinary evening
into something you think about for years. Patti came to New York as a poet and ended up
making one of the greatest debut albums ever recorded almost by accident.

• You want a friendship with some mystery in it, and small talk has never once held your
  attention.
• Horses arrived in 1975 and proved that a rock record could be literature without losing
  any of the noise.
• Her memoir Just Kids won the National Book Award, which is not a sentence anybody
  expected to write about a CBGB regular.
• This is the friend who hands you a book at four in the morning and changes what you read
  for a decade.