Underground bands, even if they don’t stay there long, have always been critical to the evolution of music, and we owe a lot to the record labels that supported them.
From Nirvana to Bad Religion, and even Slayer, some of the most influential bands of all time started out on small labels that allowed them to cultivate their sounds, leading to a sonic cultural terrain that would look very different today if it weren’t for their faith and hard work. Labels like…
Sub Pop
Hailing from the Emerald City itself — Seattle, Washington — Sub Pop Records was founded by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman in 1986. Over the years, they have worked with everyone from Soundgarden to The Postal Service.
The label was an early supporter of PNW grunge and alt-rock bands, releasing formidable albums like Nirvana’s Bleach and Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, both of which are considered to be significantly influential works.
The label later went on to release albums in the 2000s that have been met with massive critical acclaim, such as Wincing the Night Away by The Shins and Fleet Foxes’ self-titled 2008 album.
Epitaph
Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz founded Epitaph Records in the early ’80s as a way to put out his band’s albums without having to relinquish control of their creative process. Frankly, we could stop there, because Bad Religion is a band that you can trace all of modern punk back to (Green Day, Rise Against, Sum 41, etc.), but there’s still more to the story.
Over the years, the label has put out albums by some of the biggest names in punk and underground rock music, like the Vandals, L7, and Agnostic Front, just to name a few.
Epitaph is also an umbrella label for a number of other crucial record labels, like ANTI (Tom Waits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), Burning Heart Records (Flogging Molly, The Hives), and Hellcat Records, founded by Tim Armstrong of Rancid, who is also signed with Epitaph.
Victory Records
This one is going to be controversial for several reasons, but the fact of the matter is that without Victory, many beloved hardcore, punk, metal, emo, and screamo albums would maybe never have seen the light of day, and therefore the evolution of underground scene music would have looked completely different.
Literally off the top of my head… Refused’s Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent, Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends, Thursday’s Full Collapse, Between the Buried and Me’s Mordecai, A Day to Remember’s Homesick, and Atreyu’s Suicide Notes and Butterfly Kisses.
Now, I do have to mention that Victory and its founder, Tony Brummel, have not had a great relationship with a number of bands on the label, including some of the ones mentioned above. It’s all a very complicated and complex matter that I’m not qualified to weigh in on, so I’ll just stop here to throw on my Sinai Beach Immersed CD
Metal Blade
Founded around the same time as Epitaph — and doing for metal what that label did for punk was — was Brian Slagel’s Metal Blade Records, complete with a bloody axe logo that foreshadowed the brutality to come.
Just to give you what I feel is a great example, Metal Blade put out the four projects that Slayer ever recorded: Show No Mercy (1983), Haunting the Chapel EP (June 1984), Live Undead (Nov. 1984), and Hell Awaits (1985).
I’m obviously leaning hard on the Slayer (they’re my Beatles), but there are tons of really important bands that put out music with Metal Blade: Mercyful Fate, Cannibal Corpse, King’s X, Amon Amarth, Cattle Decapitation, The Black Dahlia Murder, Whitechapel, etc.
You wanna talk about the landscape of underground rock and metal music? There’s literally no telling how different it would be without Metal Blade there to let bands have the space to forge their own sounds without being shackled to label demands.
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