The best grunge songs for every year from 1987 to 1996, according to Loudwire

As happens with many musical genres, grunge doesn't have a real birth or end date either. Many of the scene's key figures are still active today, and new bands continue to emerge carrying on the legacy of the Pacific Northwest sound. For this new list, the magazine Loudwire looked at the period when grunge began to take hold, reached its peak, and then started to lose momentum. "Its roots," Loudwire notes, "go back to the mid-Eighties, but 1987 was the first year in which bands like Soundgarden and Melvins began releasing albums and singles that would go on to define the movement. Its peak popularity came between the early and mid-Nineties, before gradually giving way to other trends. By 1996, Nirvana had already been broken up for two years, Alice in Chains had slowed down their activity, and the record industry was shifting its attention toward bands like Korn and the emerging nu metal scene. Three aspects were assessed for each year: the quality of the song, its success, and its lasting impact. For this reason, some artists appear more than once on the list: they were simply among the most influential figures of the entire grunge era," the magazine concludes.

So here are the best grunge songs of each year, according to Loudwire (full feature here)

• Soundgarden – Hunted Down (single, 1987)
• Mudhoney – Touch Me I'm Sick (Superfuzz Bigmuff, 1988)
• Nirvana – About a Girl (Bleach, 1989)
• Alice in Chains – We Die Young (Facelift, 1990)
• Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nevermind, 1991)
• Alice in Chains – Would? (Dirt, 1992)
• Pearl Jam – Go (Vs., 1993)
• Soundgarden – The Day I Tried to Live (Superunknown, 1994)
• Mad Season – River of Deceit (Above, 1995)
• Screaming Trees – All I Know (Dust, 1996)

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