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Soundgarden
Soundgarden, formed in Seattle in 1984, predated most of the other major grunge-era bands by several years and helped establish the genre's foundational sound, blending heavy metal's musical weight and technical guitar work with punk's rawer energy and more emotionally direct songwriting. Frontman Chris Cornell's exceptionally wide vocal range, capable of both a powerful, metal-influenced wail and more subdued, melodic passages within the same song, distinguished Soundgarden's sound from many grunge contemporaries and made Cornell one of the era's most technically respected vocalists. The band's 1994 album Superunknown became a major commercial breakthrough, and the singles "Black Hole Sun" and "Spoonman" brought Soundgarden's more explicitly metal-influenced version of grunge to a mainstream radio and MTV audience alongside the era's other major Seattle acts. Cornell's 2017 suicide, following the band's initial 1997 breakup and a subsequent 2010 reunion, ended Soundgarden's active career for a second and final time, and his death, alongside those of several other prominent grunge-era musicians, has contributed to the genre's lasting reputation for genuine personal and psychological struggle running alongside its commercial and critical success.
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Nirvana
Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind, led by the single "Smells Like Teen Spirit," unexpectedly displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the top of the Billboard 200, a commercial breakthrough that's widely credited with bringing grunge and alternative rock into mainstream American popular music almost overnight. Frontman Kurt Cobain's raw, often deliberately unpolished songwriting and his combination of pop melodic sensibility with punk-influenced aggression gave Nirvana's music a genuinely distinctive sound that record labels and radio programmers had previously assumed wouldn't achieve major commercial success. Cobain's struggles with heroin addiction and depression, chronicled increasingly openly in interviews and lyrics throughout the band's brief mainstream period, culminated in his 1994 suicide at 27, ending Nirvana's active career after barely three years of major mainstream visibility and cementing Cobain's place in music's "27 Club" of prominent musicians who died at that age. Nirvana's brief but massively influential mainstream run fundamentally reshaped the commercial landscape of American rock radio and MTV programming throughout the 1990s, effectively ending the mainstream dominance of the hair metal and glam rock that had preceded it, and the band's influence on subsequent alternative rock remains foundational despite their genuinely brief active career.
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