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Hüsker Dü at NYC's Peppermint Lounge in 1985 by Greg Cristman
The phrase “alternative rock” generally makes people think of the ’90s, but it’s been well documented that Nevermind was the culmination of something that had been bubbling up since the ’80s, not the genre’s birthplace. It’s never really possible to pinpoint an exact time or place that a genre was born, but for alternative rock–especially the kind that was born out of the American punk underground–1984 might have been the first year that multiple pivotal, widely-influential albums came out at once. With those albums all celebrating 40th anniversaries this year, here’s a look back on 10 of the most timeless ones.
The list is about both alt-rock and post-hardcore, not necessarily in the “sounds like Quicksand” sense but in the sense that the majority of the albums on this list came from bands in the hardcore scene who wanted to push themselves past the often-strict confines of the genre. History repeats itself, and we’re living in a time right now where the current hardcore scene is embracing alt-rock, grunge is infiltrating both indie rock and mainstream pop music, and both the indie and hardcore adjacent grunge lovers are joining forces. It’s as good a time as any to remember that grunge/alt-rock comes from hardcore in the first place, and it’s also good timing to revisit the albums on this list with the context of how much they paved the way for music happening not just in 1991 but right now.
Read on for the list, in alphabetical order…
Black Flag – My War
SST
Black Flag actually released not one but three albums in 1984 because legal issues with MCA subsidiary Unicorn Records prevented the band from releasing new music for a period of about two years, so My War–most of which was originally demoed in 1982–was actually even more ahead of its time than it seemed. Having already helped invent short, fast hardcore, My War saw Black Flag slowing down and extending songs past the six-minute mark.
Former bassist Chuck Dukowski (who wrote the title track and “I Love You” but left before the album was recorded) brought some of the influence of his pre-Black Flag metal band Würm, and founding guitarist Greg Ginn was indulging in a love of Black Sabbath that manifested itself in the album’s B side, with three slow-paced riff feasts that–combined with Henry Rollins’ hardcore bark–laid the groundwork for almost all of sludge metal and a lot of grunge. My War also saw Rollins coming into his own as a lyricist, writing (and butting heads) with Ginn, and bringing a heightened sense of darkness and negativity that set the tone for ’90s teenage angst just as much as the album’s fuzzed-out sonics. Side B gets the credit for shocking the hardcore community with songs that were considered damn near antithetical to the genre, but side A is just as influential–the scuzzy “Can’t Decide” especially sounds like grunge before grunge existed. Bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Melvins have all talked about the album’s influence on their own music, and even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be very hard to pick up on. Just as Nervous Breakdown set the tone for countless snotty, fast-paced punk bands, it’s nearly impossible to guess how the alternative rock boom of the ’90s would’ve sounded without the direct influence and ripple effect of My War.
Hüsker Dü – Zen Arcade
SST
Hüsker Dü’s taste already went beyond punk rock before they broke a land speed record on their fast-paced hardcore debut, and it didn’t take them long to start bringing those non-hardcore influences into the hardcore scene. They showed off their love of ’60s psychedelia with a Donovan cover on 1983’s Everything Falls Apart, and they prefaced the release of 1984’s Zen Arcade with a cover of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.” On Zen Arcade proper, all bets were off. Being a 70-minute double album alone made it go deeply against the grain of hardcore, and the music within ranges from hardcore ragers like the immortal opener “Something I Learned Today” to the acoustic “Never Talking To You Again” to the band’s own brand of psychedelia (“Hare Krsna,” “The Tooth Fairy and the Princess,” and the 14-minute jam “Reoccurring Dreams”) to the garagey proto-punk of “What’s Going On” to sweetly melodic, proto-alt-rock songs like “Chartered Trips,” “Standing by the Sea,” and “Pink Turns to Blue.”
Like so many great double albums, Zen Arcade goes in countless different directions, and it’s the kind of album that you can spend a lifetime listening to and hear something new every time. It’s very literally “post-hardcore” in the way that it bucks against almost every convention of the genre without abandoning it entirely, and those proto-alt-rock songs sound nearly a decade ahead of their time. Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic famously said “What Nirvana did was nothing new; Husker Du did it before us,” and with today’s hardcore scene embracing alt-rock, Zen Arcade is a still-relevant reminder that history repeats itself.
Meat Puppets – Meat Puppets II
SST
Meat Puppets were never your average punk band–even their first album has a Doc Watson cover, a “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” cover, and was allegedly recorded in the midst of a three-day acid trip–but by the time they made Meat Puppets II, they really didn’t care about remaining within anyone else’s definition of punk rock. “The punk rock scene started to get a little stodgy, and a little bit demanding in terms of like laying down the parameters of what was ok to do,” bassist Cris Kirkwood told us in 2016. “And that was not punk rock to us.”
On Meat Puppets II, they embraced their love of bluegrass, jazz, psychedelia, the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and really whatever else piqued their interest. The result is an album that’s punk as fuck, regardless of how little it sounds like the Ramones. As the swampiest SST band, the influence that Meat Puppets II had on people like J Mascis and Kurt Cobain would be obvious even if Nirvana didn’t bring the Puppets on stage to play three songs from this album during their MTV Unplugged set. It’s not just proto-grunge; it’s more grunge than all the ’90s yarlers who scraped off the mud instead of dousing themselves in it.
Minutemen – Double Nickels on the Dime
SST
The Minutemen’s motto “we jam econo” (San Pedro slang for “economic”) was a reference to how D. Boon, Mike Watt, and George Hurley kept things low-budget to foster a DIY lifestyle, but it also applied to the way they wrote music. From Mike Watt’s funk basslines to D. Boon’s jammy lead guitar style, Double Nickels on the Dime sounds like squeezing a jam band into two-minute songs. Like their labelmates the Meat Puppets, the Minutemen pulled from all kinds of non-punk music–with elements of jazz, prog, funk, folk music, spoken word, and covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Van Halen, Steely Dan–and performed that music in the most punk way possible. They were also inspired by Creedence’s political protest music and the lyricism of Double Nickels on the Dime reflected that too.
According to Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, Minutemen weren’t planning to do a double album until their labelmates Hüsker Dü banged out Zen Arcade in three days, and that lit a fire under the Minutemen’s asses to write more songs and release their own double LP. And, like Zen Arcade, the result was one of the best double albums ever made. Double Nickels on the Dime rewrote the rules for what a punk band–or just a band in general–could be, and it still sounds radical today. It’s not hard to hear the album’s influence on anyone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Guided by Voices to Fugazi, but for the most part, the Minutemen’s vast influence tends to come through on a spiritual and ideological level. No other band sounds like Double Nickels on the Dime, and I don’t know if anyone even could if they tried.
R.E.M. – Reckoning
I.R.S.
R.E.M. got so much bigger than most of the bands we’re talking about that it can almost feel jarring to put them in the same conversation 40 years later, but they were more connected to the bulk of this list back then than it might seem now, and Reckoning is a crucial part of what made 1984 such a pivotal year for alt-rock. They had toured with The Replacements a year earlier, they influenced Nirvana and the Pixies and Radiohead and Pearl Jam and maybe every indie or alt-rock band ever, and they still sound like an unpolished underground band on Reckoning. To quote The Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn in R.E.M. : Talk About the Passion : An Oral History, “They invented a whole new ballgame for all of the other bands to follow whether it was Sonic Youth or the Replacements or Nirvana or Butthole Surfers. R.E.M. staked the claim. Musically, the bands did different things, but R.E.M. was first to show us you can be big and still be cool.”
As the followup to R.E.M.’s instant-classic 1983 debut Murmur, Reckoning is the band’s slightly weirder, looser, perennially-underrated sophomore album–their Room On Fire or their Neon Bible or their A Weekend in the City–that’s every bit as good as its perfect predecessor. Maybe even better. From the patchwork quilt of guitar patterns that fuel “Harborcoat” to the beautifully soaring harmonies of “Pretty Persuasion” to the slow-burning “Camera” to the countrified “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville,” Reckoning is a shapeshifting album that still sounds inventive after four decades. Maybe it’s because popularity tends to date things faster, but these songs still sound more timeless than some of R.E.M.’s own most widely loved hits. It’s an R.E.M. album unlike any other, and its influence is still either directly or indirectly everywhere.
The Replacements – Let It Be
Twin/Tone
Fresh off touring with R.E.M., The Replacements cleaned up (sort of), brought R.E.M.’s Peter Buck into the studio for a guest guitar solo, and made one of the greatest alternative rock albums of all time. Traces of the band’s punk roots remained, but Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash this is not. The piano ballad “Androgynous” and the acoustic guitar-fueled “Unsatisfied” cut through the album’s noisy exterior and emerge as downright beautiful songs–the former is among the band’s most oft-covered songs and lives on as an LGBTQ anthem. Opener “I Will Dare” is one of those quintessential Replacements songs you could show someone who’s never heard the band, and “We’re Comin’ Out” shows they could still bang out rippers. 40 years later and we’re still wondering if the KISS cover “Black Diamond” is sincere, ironic, or both, but it’s so good that it doesn’t matter. The Replacements embraced cheesy rock as much as they embraced hardcore punk, they embraced sloppy noise as much as they embraced tear-jerking beauty. Let It Be is perfect in all of its imperfections, and even glowing remarks like that one feel like an understatement. It’s one of those albums that, however good people say it is, it’s better.
Scratch Acid – Scratch Acid EP
Rabid Cat
Before there was The Jesus Lizard, David Yow and David Wm. Sims had Scratch Acid, and their 1984 self-titled debut EP is as much a GOAT as Goat. Yow’s unhinged vocals, Sims’ pummeling basslines, and Brett Bradford’s noise-laden guitar riffs can be heard in everyone from Nirvana (Kurt called this EP one of his 50 favorite albums) to pretty much every band that ever blended post-hardcore and noise rock (like Chat Pile, IDLES, METZ, KEN mode, Pissed Jeans, etc). The 22-minute EP is long enough to count as a full-length by punk standards, and there’s enough controlled chaos within these eight songs that bands have spent four decades trying to rip them off. The influence that this EP alone has had is bigger than the band itself, and these 40-year-old songs still sound like they’d pop off if they came out tomorrow.
The Smiths – The Smiths
Rough Trade
This list is admittedly US-centric because it’s mostly focused on the hardcore-informed and grunge-adjacent definition of “alternative rock,” but it’d be pretty impossible to talk about 1984 being a pivotal year for alt-rock and not mention the first Smiths album. Jangle-master Johnny Marr was like Peter Buck’s British counterpart, and as for mope-master Morrissey… what would the last 40 years of alternative rock have sounded like without his romantic melodrama? The band emerged out of the UK post-punk scene, but it wouldn’t be any more accurate to call The Smiths “post-punk” than it would be to call the Meat Puppets “hardcore.” Whoever you tried to compare them to, they sounded different. Whoever influenced them–be it The Byrds, The Velvet Underground, or the New York Dolls–they transcended those influences and made them their own. They got even better throughout their airtight, four-albums-in-four-years run, but they already had their unique approach entirely figured out on this debut. And once you fuse The Smiths’ influence with any of the more hardcore-informed albums on this list, you’ve pretty much got the ingredients for the vast majority of popular post-hardcore and emo.
Soul Asylum – Say What You Will, Clarence… Karl Sold the Truck
Twin/Tone
Nine years and six albums before “Runaway Train” made Soul Asylum a mainstream alt-rock household name, the Minneapolis band ran in the same post-hardcore circle as fellow Twin Cities bands The Replacements and Hüsker Dü. Their first two albums came out on the same label as the ‘Mats (Twin/Tone), and the first two were produced by Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould. On their debut LP Say What You Will, Clarence… Karl Sold the Truck, they’re right in that same musical realm as Let It Be and Zen Arcade, and it’s pretty impossible to imagine liking those albums but not this one. Dave Pirner’s voice is a lot rougher around the edges on this LP than on the band’s biggest hits, but Soul Asylum’s sense of melody is already there on this debut. Like their now-more-acclaimed neighbors, Say What You Will has the ruthless energy of the punk scene, the ragged glory of early alt-rock, and hooks that stick with you immediately. It’s easy to hear the ways this album helped bridge the gap between the hardcore era and the grunge era, and it’s a shame that this and other early Soul Asylum records rarely get the respect that their closest peers are frequently afforded. Say What You Will is a good deal ahead of its time, and with bands continuing to make hardcore-informed alt-rock, it sounds like something people would still flip out for today.
U-Men – U-Men EP
Bombshelter (later reissued by Sub Pop)
All this talk of proto-grunge and no Seattle bands… until now. The alphabetical list wraps up with U-Men, one of the earliest bands associated with the grunge movement and the first band to ever be managed by the famed Susan Silver, whose client roster later included Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Screaming Trees, and more. (U-Men were also the first notable band of bassist Jim Tillman, later of the underrated grunge band Love Battery.) Their 1984 self-titled debut EP on Bruce Pavitt’s pre-Sub Pop label Bombshelter Records has just four songs, but that’s enough to earn it a spot on this list. It’s noisy, dirty, deranged, and rooted in punk but not confined to it–just about all the ingredients for bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden to later pick up on. In the bio for their discography compilation on Sub Pop, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm called them “the undisputed kings of the Seattle Underground” and wrote, “The U-Men are one of the best bands I’ve ever seen. They were hypnotic, frenetic, powerful and compelling. It was impossible to resist getting sucked into their weird, darkly absurd world.” 40 years later, that’s still true.
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Listen to a playlist with all 10 albums:
RELATED LISTS:
* Nirvana’s 10 Best Cover Songs
* 15 ’80s albums that shaped pop punk
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Top photo: Hüsker Dü at NYC’s Peppermint Lounge in 1985. More by Greg Cristman here.
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