The ’90s might have belonged to grunge, but the genre didn’t just disappear in the 2000s, because a lot of bands made some great music past the flannel-clad decade.
Pearl Jam, Bush, Alice in Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots are just a few grunge bands that continued to drop great music past 1999. They’re not the only ones, though. Tons of other grunge and grunge-adjacent bands did the same thing, only quieter…
Mudhoney
Most well-known for their jam-grunge track “Touch Me I’m Sick,” Mudhoney has long been a crucial band in the grunge scene. They were born out of the demise of Green River, one of the first definitive grunge bands to emerge from the Seattle music scene roughly four decades ago.
From the late ’80s into the ’90s, Mudhoney built a reputation of being one of the most respected grunge bands of the era, opting to be committed to their art over pleasing record labels.
While dedicated fans will point to their early records like Superfuzz Bigmuff (1988), or their wildly popular ’90s albums like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (1991) and its follow-up, Piece of Cake (1992), the band never stopped making killer albums.
Mudhoney’s 2006 album, Under a Billion Suns, is practically a masterpiece in songcrafting, and their 2023 record, Plastic Eternity, is just as confrontational and bass-heavy as their early work.
Cracker
To borrow a saying by the famed NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby… If you don’t love “Low” by Cracker, then, with all due respect, f–k you. It’s literally one of the greatest grunge songs of all time.
Formed in the aftermath of lead singer David Lowery’s former band, Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker was a dominant force in southern grunge in the ’90s, and, frankly, that really didn’t change with the turn of the millennium.
Across five albums released from 2002 to 2014, Cracker kept their edge (“March of the Billionaires”) and found new ways to revamp their sound, like their collab album with Colorado bluegrass jam-band Leftover Salmon. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more clever approach to evolving grunge.
The Afghan Whigs
An argument could be made that The Afghan Wigs have never really been “grunge,” and that would be a fair argument in some regards, but I disagree with it, and this is my list, so if you are an Afghan-Wigs-grunge-denier, well, this is where I leave you.
Songs like “Gentlemen” — from the 1993 album of the same name — and pretty much the entire Up In It album from 1990, are great examples of the Afghan Wigs’ grunge style, though, like I said, it’s fair to argue that they always explored their musical creativity outside of any box.
The Afghan Wigs split in the early 2000s and then eventually reunited, putting out a trio of albums over the past decade that I literally cannot recommend enough: Do to the Beast (2014), In Spades (2017), and How Do You Burn? (2022). They’re all distinctive, for sure, but maintain an air of dark inventiveness that none of their peers come close to matching.
Candlebox
I’m gonna try not to do a whole history lesson on Candlebox, but suffice to say, their self-titled 1993 debut album is one of the greatest grunge records of all time. Over the next several years, the band dropped two more albums and then went mostly quiet for about a decade, eventually returning with 2008’s Into The Sun.
Candlebox went on record three more albums in the 2000s, before announcing a farewell record, The Final Goodbye, in 2023. Now, here is where I get really excited because this album is really, really fuckin good. When it dropped, I was so bummed that it was to be their swansong project — along with a farewell tour — because in my personal opinion, it’s easily one of their best albums. Top 3, no question.
Thankfully, it seems a lot of fans felt the same way, and the response was so overwhelming that the band has since decided to keep the grunge flame burning.
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