Grunge
The 8 Best Grunge
Tracks of All Time
Seattle from 1988: hardcore's volume and independence welded to Black Sabbath riffs and pop melodies, on a local label with a deliberate house aesthetic, three years before the whole thing was sold to the world as a youth movement.
- Origin
- Seattle, Washington, 1988
- Tempo
- 90–150 BPM
- Also known as
- seattle sound, sub pop, the seattle scene
- Tracks
- 8
- Updated
- 2026-08-31
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Number 1: Nirvana / Smells Like Teen Spirit
1991 · DGC
Cobain called it an attempt to write a Pixies song. Four chords, a quiet verse, an unintelligible chorus, and the end of one era of popular music inside three months.
Number 2: Mudhoney / Touch Me I'm Sick
1988 · Sub Pop
The founding document, and much funnier than what followed. A fuzz pedal, a Sonics riff, and no interest whatsoever in being taken seriously.
Also on The Eighties
Number 4: Alice in Chains / Would?
1992 · Columbia
Written about Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone, dead of an overdose at twenty-four. Staley's harmonies with Cantrell are the most distinctive sound the scene produced.
Number 5: Soundgarden / Outshined
1991 · A&M
In seven-four, which nobody in the audience noticed, and Cornell singing at the top of a range most people do not have. The most technically able band in Seattle.
Number 6: Nirvana / Negative Creep
1989 · Sub Pop
Bleach, recorded for six hundred dollars. Before the melodies took over, and a useful corrective to the idea that Nirvana were ever a pop group by accident.
Number 8: Pixies / Where Is My Mind?
1988 · 4AD
Boston, not Seattle, and Cobain said plainly that he was trying to rip them off. The quiet-loud-quiet structure that defined the decade is theirs.