Seattle Grunge

You're asking about a city before you're asking about a sound. Grunge is what happened when Seattle kids who loved Black Sabbath and Black Flag equally stopped pretending those were separate records.

The guitars are detuned, the tempos drag where metal would sprint, and the singing is loud and unguarded — that combination got made in a handful of rooms by a few dozen people who all knew each other.

Sub Pop opened in Seattle in 1988, run by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, and built a house sound with producer Jack Endino at Reciprocal Recording. Green River — containing future members of Mudhoney and Pearl Jam — had already split by then.

Soundgarden went to SST and then A&M; Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" (1988) and the Sub Pop 200 compilation gave the label its identity, helped along by heavy UK press coverage. Nirvana's Bleach came out on Sub Pop in 1989 for a famously small recording budget.

Nevermind landed on DGC in September 1991 and displaced Michael Jackson from the US number one in January 1992. Within two years the word "grunge" was a clothing category.

Kurt Cobain died in April 1994; Layne Staley in 2002; Chris Cornell in 2017.

Who: Sub Pop, Jack Endino, Steve Albini on In Utero, Rick Parashar's London Bridge Studio, the Crocodile Cafe, the OK Hotel. What: drop-D or lower, fuzz pedals pushed into cheap amps, drums recorded big and dry, vocals sung rather than shouted — the thing that separated it from hardcore.

Alice In Chains came up through the metal circuit, Mudhoney through garage punk, so the "sound" is a range, not a template. How it works: the records that count were cut fast, locally, before the majors arrived, or by people who kept working that way after.