Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1988

Alternative metal

Emerged 1988 Origin USA Subgenres — Vocals Sung and screamed
Heaviness
7
Speed
5
Melody
7

Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.

In short

Metal weight without the dress code or the scene rules: unconventional structures and influences from post-punk, funk or shoegaze.

How it sounds

  • Metal weight with structures and textures borrowed from post-punk, funk or shoegaze.
  • Low tunings and thick guitar tone, often with no solos at all.
  • Variable vocals: sung, spoken, whispered, screamed, sometimes in one song.

Hear what that means

  • A riff that is almost all rhythm

    Helmet - Meantime

    One note, palm-muted, in a syncopated pattern. Helmet's innovation is proving a riff needs no melodic content at all if the rhythm is strong enough - an idea nu metal took wholesale.

    Open on YouTube
  • Odd metre that grooves from 20:23

    Tool - Ænima

    The bass carries the melody, the drums play against the guitar rather than with it, and the metre keeps shifting without ever announcing itself. Difficulty buried inside a groove.

    Open on YouTube at 20:23
  • Quiet on a metal record from 3:09

    Deftones - White Pony

    Whispered vocals, clean guitar and a lot of space, on an album that also screams. Alternative metal is where the metal branch rediscovers dynamics.

    Open on YouTube at 3:09

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
90-140 bpm
Song length
4-6 min
Tuning
Drop D and lower, and frequently altered tunings borrowed from outside metal entirely. The tuning is chosen per song rather than fixed by the genre.
Production
Roomy and dynamic, with the drums recorded live and loud. These records deliberately keep the quiet parts quiet, which almost nothing else on the metal branch was doing in the 1990s.
Written about
Dissociation, Ritual and belief, Sex and its damage, Refusal of metal's own conventions

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Riffs built on space and repetition rather than on speed, often using an unresolved interval held long enough to become uncomfortable. Helmet's innovation is a riff that is almost entirely rhythm on one note.
  • Bass Frequently the lead melodic voice, and mixed to be one. Alternative metal is where the metal branch rediscovers the bass as an instrument with a part.
  • Drums Tight, syncopated and jazz-influenced, playing against the guitar rather than with it. The groove is the point, and the tempo is deliberately unhurried.
  • Vocals Sung, whispered and screamed, chosen for the section rather than for the genre. This is where metal singing stops being one register per band.

What it isn't

That it is a holding pen for bands nobody could classify. It has a positive definition: metal instrumentation used with alternative rock's assumptions — dynamics that go quiet, structures that do not resolve, and a refusal of the genre signals that metal had accumulated by 1988. That is a coherent artistic position, and it is why the bands filed here sound so unlike each other while sharing an obvious sensibility.

Told apart from

  • Nu metal Nu metal is the commercial wing that grew out of this, with hip-hop rhythm, turntables and lower tunings. Alternative metal keeps solos, conventional song structure and a much wider palette.
  • Progressive metal Both are ambitious and both use odd metres. Prog metal displays the difficulty; alternative metal buries it inside something that grooves.
  • Noise rock Where several of these bands came from — the same dissonance and the same volume, without metal's tuning or its audience.
  • Industrial metal Shares the rhythmic obsession and the flat affect, and locks it to a machine. Alternative metal keeps a human rhythm section that breathes.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

At the end of the 1980s, a few bands wanted metal's weight without its subculture: no leather, no dragons, no virtuoso solos. Faith No More, Helmet and later Deftones proved it was possible — Helmet looked like graduate students, Tool built an entire visual universe, Deftones listened to Cocteau Twins. It is the branch that produces nu metal and, indirectly, much of today's festival metal.

Descended from

Also influenced by

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Stoner rock 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Grunge 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Rap rock 1.7 apart by rating · no shared ancestor

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.