Post-grunge
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
The grunge formula cleaned up for radio: same dynamics, less dirt, vastly more airplay.
How it sounds
- The same dynamics, but with radio production: heavy compression, symmetrical guitars.
- Melodic choruses with doubled and harmonised vocals.
- Simplified riffing, mid tempos, fixed structures.
Hear what that means
- The dynamic, executed precisely
Foo Fighters - The Colour and the Shape
Grunge's quiet-loud kept as a technique after the discomfort that produced it had gone. Extremely well made, which is both the achievement and the charge.
Open on YouTube - The rasp, controlled
A vocal technique developed to convey damage, deployed accurately as a texture. This is the crux of every argument about the genre.
Open on YouTube - Where the seam shows from 3:14
A band frequently accused of imitation writing something the bands they were accused of imitating could not have. The craft is not in dispute.
Open on YouTube at 3:14
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 100-140 bpm
- Song length
- 3.5-4.5 min
- Tuning
- Drop D almost universally, with the guitars quad-tracked and tightly edited — the sag of grunge's tuning kept and its looseness removed.
- Production
- Enormous, compressed and radio-mastered, with every element in its place. These records are extremely well made, which is both the genre's achievement and the charge against it.
- Written about
- Relationships, Loss, Perseverance, Interior struggle, generalised
What each part is doing
- Guitar Grunge's quiet-loud dynamic executed precisely, with the clean verse chorused and the chorus wall quad-tracked. The dynamic is retained as a technique after the discomfort that produced it has gone.
- Bass Locked and simple, mixed for weight, doing nothing that would distract from the vocal.
- Drums Hit hard and heavily processed, with samples reinforcing the snare. Grohl's playing is the exception that shows what the genre usually replaced.
- Vocals The rasp, retained and controlled — sung accurately in a voice that grunge used to convey damage, which is the crux of every argument about this genre.
What it isn't
That it is worthless. The craft is real — these are precisely made records that do exactly what they intend — and the criticism is about content rather than execution: a vocal technique developed to convey a specific kind of pain, deployed as a texture on songs about nothing in particular. That is a legitimate charge and it is not the same as the music being incompetent, which it plainly is not.
Told apart from
- Grunge Post-grunge kept the guitar tone, the tuning and the vocal rasp and discarded the discomfort, which was the content. The same sound with the subject removed.
- Alternative rock Post-grunge is what the alternative branch became on commercial radio after 1994, and the format outlived the music it was named for.
- Glam metal The genre it replaced on radio, and it made exactly the same trade: enormous choruses, high production values and a diminishing relationship to whatever the scene originally meant.
- Alternative metal Alternative metal kept the experimentation and the dynamics that post-grunge smoothed out. They occupied adjacent radio slots and sound very different up close.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
After 1994 the majors went looking for bands that sounded like grunge without the risk. Foo Fighters made the good version of the formula; others made the commercial-radio version. It is among the best-selling and most mocked genres in rock history, sometimes deservedly.
Descended from
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Glam rock 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Southern rock 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Folk metal 1.4 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.