Nirvana

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• Top 6 Grunge and Alternative Bands of All Time

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• Pearl Jam

  Pearl Jam's 1991 debut album Ten became one of the best-selling albums of the grunge era, and the band's combination of frontman Eddie Vedder's deep, emotionally intense baritone vocals with more traditionally structured, classic-rock-influenced songwriting distinguished them somewhat from grunge's more overtly punk-influenced contemporaries. The band's prolonged legal battle with Ticketmaster in the mid-1990s, in which Pearl Jam publicly refused to book tours through the company over its service fees and effectively curtailed their own touring for several years as a result, became one of the most significant artist-versus-industry conflicts in 1990s music, though the band ultimately couldn't sustain the boycott long-term. Pearl Jam's continued active career, sustained across more than three decades with largely the same core lineup, distinguishes them from most of their grunge-era peers, several of whom either disbanded or lost key members to death relatively early in the genre's history. The band's sustained commercial and critical relevance well past grunge's mainstream commercial peak in the mid-1990s, combined with their consistent lineup stability, has made Pearl Jam one of the most enduring and longest continuously active bands to emerge from the Seattle grunge scene specifically.

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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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• Alice in Chains

  Alice in Chains, formed in Seattle in 1987, developed a darker, heavier sound than several of their grunge-era Seattle contemporaries, blending metal-influenced guitar riffs with frontman Layne Staley and guitarist Jerry Cantrell's distinctive, closely blended vocal harmonies across two singers rather than a single lead voice. The band's lyrics frequently and openly addressed drug addiction, depression, and psychological despair with unusual directness even relative to grunge's already dark thematic content, reflecting Staley's own well-documented struggles with heroin addiction that were increasingly reflected in the band's material throughout the 1990s. Staley's addiction eventually led to his near-total withdrawal from public life and touring in the band's final years, and his 2002 death from a drug overdose, discovered only after his body had gone unnoticed in his apartment for roughly two weeks, became one of the grunge era's most somber cautionary tales. The band's eventual 2006 return with new vocalist William DuVall, rather than disbanding permanently after Staley's death, allowed Alice in Chains to continue actively touring and recording new material into the 2020s, giving them one of the more unusual survival stories among the original Seattle grunge scene's major acts.

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• Radiohead

  Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer, exploring themes of technological alienation, consumerism, and modern anxiety through increasingly experimental art-rock arrangements, is widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential albums of the 1990s, moving well beyond the more straightforward alternative rock of the band's earlier hit "Creep." The band's 2000 follow-up Kid A represented an even more dramatic stylistic departure, incorporating electronic and ambient influences that surprised and initially divided fans and critics, before the album went on to become widely reassessed as one of the most artistically ambitious major-label rock releases of its era. Radiohead's 2007 self-release of In Rainbows using a "pay what you want" pricing model, letting fans decide how much, if anything, to pay for the digital album, became one of the most widely discussed experiments in alternative music distribution and directly influenced subsequent industry conversations about digital pricing models. The band's willingness to repeatedly abandon commercially successful sounds in pursuit of new artistic directions, similar in spirit to Miles Davis's genre-shifting jazz career, has made Radiohead one of the most consistently critically respected rock bands of the past three decades, with an influence extending well beyond the alternative rock genre they originally emerged from.

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• R.E.M.

  R.E.M., formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980, is widely credited as one of the foundational bands of American alternative and college rock, building a devoted following through independent college radio airplay years before the band achieved mainstream commercial success. Guitarist Peter Buck's jangly, arpeggiated guitar style and frontman Michael Stipe's often deliberately mumbled, difficult-to-decipher vocal delivery on the band's early albums gave R.E.M. a distinctive sound that influenced a generation of subsequent alternative and indie rock guitarists and vocalists. The band's 1991 album Out of Time and its hit single "Losing My Religion" marked R.E.M.'s definitive commercial breakthrough into mainstream popularity, a shift that came after more than a decade of steadily building critical acclaim and college radio success without major commercial radio crossover. R.E.M.'s decision to formally disband in 2011, while still commercially and critically viable rather than continuing past a natural creative endpoint, was relatively unusual among major rock acts, and the band's three-decade career bridging college radio's underground scene and full mainstream commercial success established a template that numerous subsequent alternative rock bands have followed.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.