It’s easy to argue that these three bands have been pretty overplayed throughout the years. Whether their one hit took over the radio, or they’ve just been in the mainstream focus for so long, many of their better songs have flown under the radar.
Here are three underrated tracks from bands that have saturated rock music for years.
“Slow Motion” by Third Eye Blind
When you think of Third Eye Blind, it’s almost a guarantee that “Semi-Charmed Life” will come to mind first. Unless you’re a day-one superfan, much of Third Eye Blind’s better songs were drowned out by the popularity of “Semi-Charmed Life”. But “Slow Motion” has a similar disarming way about it. Where “Semi-Charmed Life” was about hard drugs dressed up in a fun-loving beat, “Slow Motion” is a satire of media exploitation in the guise of a piano ballad.
Specifically, “Slow Motion” commented on Hollywood and mainstream media’s glorification of violence and drug use. At the same time, it served to highlight the exaggeration of working and lower-class neighborhoods in the media. By depicting over-the-top scenarios, “Slow Motion” delivered a one-two punch to both the glamorization of violence and fearmongering propaganda.
“Panic Song” by Green Day
“Panic Song” is an underrated and visceral track off of Green Day’s album Insomniac. Now, as much as it pains me to say it, Green Day is overplayed. They truly peaked with American Idiot, and their subsequent releases haven’t really held up to that standard. But even before that, their hit singles were so popular that a lot of the deep album tracks got lost.
On Insomniac, “Panic Song” often gets buried beneath “Brain Stew” and “Jaded”, or “Geek Stink Breath”. And the album already wasn’t one of their bigger successes. But it does contain the strangely raw “Panic Song”, which depicts what it feels like to have a panic attack with pinpoint accuracy.
“Red Mosquito” by Pearl Jam
Another band that has been around the block for a while and has become overplayed as a result. Pearl Jam is a pillar of the 90s grunge scene, but, like Green Day, many of their more interesting songs get buried by the radio-ready hits. It does a disservice to Eddie Vedder’s more expressive songwriting.
“Red Mosquito” is one of those underrated songs, appearing on the 1996 album No Code. It already has a wild guitar sound, which lends itself to the claustrophobic lyrics. Written while Vedder was stuck in a hotel room recovering from severe food poisoning, “Red Mosquito” depicts what it’s like to be a trapped animal, feeling watched and paranoid.
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