ArsMoriendi
07.20.25 | Band wise Metallica
Album wise Nevermind |
Wildcardbitchesss
07.20.25 | Ya nevermind was for sure the most influential. Hair metal died out not long after GNR came on the scene, and I guess the black album probably comes close, but there are so many fucking bands that just would not exist without nevermind. I could name a hundred off the dome.
Most of them are terrible but there can be both good and bad influence |
arthropod
07.20.25 | The heck you mean by "over 30+"? |
zakalwe
07.20.25 | The only one that changed everything was 3 |
ConcubinaryCode
07.20.25 | 3 by far |
Trebor.
07.20.25 | Nevermind and it's not even close |
jrlikestodance
07.20.25 | 3. Hardcore kids are still making mid post-grunge music to this day |
JDubb
07.21.25 | Will say - with my boys - they are a lot more interested in 1 and 2, than 3. And especially 2 due to Master of Puppets in Stranger Things, and select Metallica tracks and skins in Fortnite. Don’t see much current love in todays youth for 3, other than the Nirvana emblem on t - shirts. |
unclereich
07.21.25 | wait til they get older and more depressed! |
Hawks
07.21.25 | Mentallica |
IAmScott
07.21.25 | Anal cunt |
Slex
07.21.25 | Nevermind
Guns N Roses is the worst band to ever exist |
el_newg
07.21.25 | Appetite is popular but nowhere near the impact of the other two imo.
Black Album changed what it meant for metal bands finding commercial success.
Nevermind shifted the entire landscape of rock music. |
brickhed
07.21.25 | I dunno nevermind and the black album both changed the entire name of the game in their genre. im biased for metal so I would say metallica but I cant deny the influence nevermind has
in short both 2 and 3 in their own respective way |
IsisScript80
07.21.25 | "Band wise Metallica
Album wise Nevermind"
Yes, agree with this. |
ThyCrossAwaits
07.21.25 | I think el_newg absolutely NAILED the answer. Guns N Roses are glorified hair metal and that whole style went nowhere except maybe…butt rock? I just think you’d be hard-pressed to find a band that counts GNR among their influences AND aren’t insufferable. |
BAT
07.21.25 | bandwise definitely metallica, mainly because of how many sub-genres of metal spawned from their early thrash stuff. i don't think their selftitled had much lasting impact other than getting mid-tempo metal radio airplay leading into stuff like pantera or nu-metal. nevermind broke an underground sound into the mainstream, it might've been more immediate than metallicas influence but it did gateway a generation of normies into more punk rock inspired stuff. appetite for destruction i feel like is the 'hybrid theory' of 80s hair metal, great stuff and all those songs hold up but the sound of its influence is localized to like 88-92.
all three have songs that are the first riffs one learns when picking up guitar, but there's no long list of beloved nevermind/appetite clones. there's definitely a lot of bands that were signed with the intent on capitalizing their success tho |
Jmal00
07.21.25 | The black album is the biggest influence in the downfall of music. Nearly single-handedly destroyed any sort of integrity metal had almost overnight. You can directly follow the lineage of it. Black album was so bad that Pantera had to step away from glam which spawned the entirety of shitter pantera clones and worse. FFDP could not exist if the black album was not crapped out back in that dreadful day. The world will never truly recover. |
ScuroFantasma
07.21.25 | Gotta be Nevermind |
MO
07.21.25 | yea nevermind easy |
Cygnatti
07.21.25 | Why and how did the black album do all that? I think grunge purists could argue the same for Nevermind. That album is really poppy for grunge. |
Wildcardbitchesss
07.21.25 | “ Guns N Roses is the worst band to ever exist”
My man. That’s what’s really important here. GnR is goated as far as dogshit bands go |
zakalwe
07.21.25 | If you were there you know that the only right answer is 3 |
RVAHC13
07.21.25 | @jrlikestodance idk what it is about the current shoegaze grunge stuff but it has next to no staying power with me. Narrow Head has some songs I like but that’s about it. |
jrlikestodance
07.21.25 | Totally with you dude, that sound was already tired in the 2010s and it's weird seeing it have a revival moment again. Would just rather throw on Alice In Chains or a classic band any day |
RVAHC13
07.21.25 | I’ve always said grunge was a scene not a genre. AIC, Soundgarden, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were all in the same scene but they all came from different schools of music. Throwing on a lot of distortion and chorus while wearing flannel is more so just imitating Nirvana |
jrlikestodance
07.21.25 | I'd love to see more grunge/alt rock meets hardcore stuff like Only Living Witness or Life of Agony's "Ugly". Kind of a shame that sound never took off. Age of Apocalypse is sort of bringing it back though |
RVAHC13
07.21.25 | You might like the band M.A.D., it’s the singer from Break Away trying to sound more like Life of Agony |
jrlikestodance
07.21.25 | Haven't heard the name Break Away in ages. Down to give it a try!
|
Emim
07.21.25 | But post-grunge butt rock infused metalcore is so much better |
brickhed
07.21.25 | okay so we agreeing black album was the most influential
makes sense to me |
IsisScript80
07.21.25 | ^ No. The prevailing thought (which again, I subscribe to), is that Nevermind was the most influential album of the three. |
brickhed
07.21.25 | what
last 10 posts was debating how influential nevermind even was and you never chimed in about it until just now |
heck
07.21.25 | nobody was debating how influential Nevermind is, they were agreeing with it lol |
IsisScript80
07.21.25 | brickhed, are you okay? |
IsisScript80
07.21.25 | For the record:
Nevermind (so far in order of post):
Ars
Wildcard
Zak
Conc
Trebor
Jrlikestodance
Slex
ME(!!! 15th post down... "and you never chimed in about it until just now" LOL!)
Scuro
MO
Most other posts are general music discussion without explicit voting. Band-wise, Metallica is generally agreed to have held the most influence... just not THIS particular album.
|
Thor
07.21.25 | In terms of influencing other bands? Nevermind. In terms of influencing production/mixing? Black Album. |
chemicalmarriage
07.21.25 | Thor is correct |
Muzz79
07.22.25 | [3] |
mkmusic1995
07.23.25 | I was trying to think of how Appetite could be viewed as the most influential of these three and I can't. It's just one of those records that exploded at the time and has remained a popular rock/metal album and other than being a good record, I don't know why.
Agree with Thor, perfect explanation. |
RVAHC13
07.23.25 | It influenced a lot of t-shirts being sold at hot topic. Then again so did the other two… |
jrlikestodance
07.23.25 | Appetite objectively has 3 of the greatest karaoke songs of all time |
RVAHC13
07.23.25 | I would say it was both the peak and the beginning of the end for the 80’s hard rock era. No other band could top AFD (although if you ask me I always preferred Motley Crue or WASP) and there was nowhere to really go after that. Once bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden and AIC started getting popular that was the final nail in the proverbial coffin. GNR weren’t game changers but moreso a model of what good pop radio hard rock was. |
botb
07.23.25 | 2, no question. I also unabashedly hate axl rose so |
gabba
07.23.25 | Nevermind is by far the most influential, it defined an era, changing music for good. Appetite… is just a timestamp album, might be popular at karaoke bars, but hardly anyone takes it seriously apart from dads jamming it on fishing trips. As for the Black Album, it popularized metal for the unitiated, but was hardly revolutionary for the genre even by Metallica’s standards. |
zakalwe
07.23.25 | Absolutely Gabba.
The others are big albums within their fields.
Nevermind was a revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since to the same degree. |
Ladron93
07.24.25 | I'm with Thor, as well. Even though, I don't influence Nevermind personally. |
IAmScott
07.24.25 | oh wow uhh this is really the top featured list lmao |
AlexKzillion
07.24.25 | nevermind > black album > appetite is the correct order
gonna stand up for appetite a little tho. maybe isn't the most influential musically speaking but are axl, slash etc. not the textbook definition of "rockstars" yet to be surpassed for like 40yrs now?? feel like every big american artist that has pushed themselves as "bad boys" in any genre has just been mining the gnr playbook.
i'd also argue appetite absolutely opened up the door for the black album and nevermind to be the widely accepted cultural phenomenons they became. might have similar aesthetics musically but gnr were absolutely not a hair metal band from a vibe/image perspective. appetite blew up precisely because of how "real" it was compared to shit like motley crue, def leppard, and all the other hair bands... and for christ sakes it came out 4 years earlier than the other two as well.
not to mention, lars has straight up admitted to jamming appetite on a plane in the 80s and being absolutely blown away by it. do we not think that influenced metallica's decision to slow things down and recruit bob rock for the black album?? or to do a co-headlining tour with them?? lars was absolutely infatuated with axl. also iirc axl and duff were buddies with cobain years before nevermind dropped (tho had a falling out post-nevermind). duff (and also kirk hammett) were super early supporters of the seattle scene in the 80s... so much so i think i recall kirk citing soundgarden as an influence on the black album.
nevermind surpasses the black album though by virtue of a) how insecure lars always is when asked about nirvana in interviews and b) metallica's trajectory so obviously being affected by the seattle scene (even if not nirvana specifically) with load/reload. hell there's videos of metallica making fun of cobain's suicide on stage in the 90s. don't even need to start on how threatened axl felt by them. |
Retter42
07.24.25 | 3,2,1 |
garas
07.24.25 | Nevermind, I guess that one made grunge popular(?). Hard rock and thrash have already started their engines. |
AlexKzillion
07.24.25 | would def argue the black album sorta invented/popularized a brand of sanitized "groove metal" that mainstream rock radio still hasn't quite moved on from. godsmack, disturbed, volbeat, and everything that stemmed from those groups are all branches from the black album tree. |
AlexKzillion
07.24.25 | also final thought but on further review i feel like a lot the post-grunge bands of the late 90s/early 00s sound a lot more like pearl jam, alice in chains, soundgarden than they do nirvana
nirvana was surely the biggest of those bands and inspired the most people to dive deeper into music/pick up instruments... but the influences and traits that made their sound were a lot more esoteric/less easily replicable for those who grew up on nirvana.
i think you can certainly make an argument guns n roses and metallica were lone-disruptors while nirvana had the weight of an entire scene behind them. think we're maybe attributing the influence of grunge to strictly nirvana maybe more than we should. |
zakalwe
07.24.25 | That’s it Al.
Nirvana were inimitable.
What they had was the channelled late eighties/early nineties teen angst manifest.
They were a force.
|
TheSonomaDude
07.25.25 | Honestly i’d replace GNR with Korn’s s/t. Not sure what the sales were but i can name you 50 bands that basically plagiarized that album’s sound to get where they are. Pantera probably above GNR for influence too. |
zakalwe
07.25.25 | That and Burn My Eyes were the two albums that took metal off into another direction and it’s never been the same. |
AlexKzillion
07.25.25 | hadn't really thought about it until this thread but i spent a lot of time hanging with my dad and his friends growing up and absolutely none of them fucked with nirvana while being huge fans of gnr and metallica. not like i was there but nevermind feels like it was a cultural line in the sand of sorts between gen x and the boomers. |
TheSonomaDude
07.25.25 | yeah I will say nirvana are one of the few bands with sizable respect across almost all music communities, from tiktokers to boomers, from metalheads to indie elitists. meanwhile metallica and GNR are hated even amongst fans of their native genres. never mind is one of those albums I can see people discussing 100 years from its release. metallica has already tapered off quite a bit. |
AlexKzillion
07.25.25 | while true i'd say nirvana heavily heavily benefits in that regard from the fact that cobain died before he could become an old out of touch geezer who made increasingly subpar music. he never got the chance to say... "cut his hair" or fight napster or have a multi-decade feud with dave ghrol or make a st. anger/chinese democracy... he's 27 forever.
if gnr or metallica just completely ended never to return after 1992 would they not be held on a somewhat similar pedestal? gnr maybe a little too controversial, metallica a little too niche... but can't be that far off. |
thatbandsucks
07.26.25 | Just because a bunch of emo bands that nobody cares about is going grunge now doesn't make Nirvana "influential."
You gotta put into consideration that grunge literally died for a whole decade until Citizen came along a picked it back up.
also, if anything these emo bands are prob just going grunge because the 90s in general is making a comeback so it can match their baggy ass jeans and vintage graphic tees. |
jrlikestodance
07.26.25 | Citizen suck. I'd argue Superheaven (who are also mid) were more influential than them in that regard |
thatbandsucks
07.26.25 | sure, that one dumbass song by Superheaven that rips off deftones and chevelle and arguably a couple other bands started the grunge/emo trend.
also, Citizen slays shutup |
NudeTayne
07.29.25 | black album for me because I'm a boomer |
kodama
08.02.25 | > The black album is the biggest influence in the downfall of music. Nearly single-handedly destroyed any sort of integrity metal had almost overnight. You can directly follow the lineage of it. Black album was so bad that Pantera had to step away from glam which spawned the entirety of shitter pantera clones and worse. FFDP could not exist if the black album was not crapped out back in that dreadful day. The world will never truly recover.
I was 14 too at some point I guess. What a reddit take.
|
WyattEarp
08.14.25 | Of the three, Nevermind is the most influential.
Bleach is the best Nirvana album, though, and in turn is a ripoff of Gluey Porch Treatments. |
Jmal00
08.14.25 | Kodama don’t be yet another snooze no talent metal defender man. Grow a spine and make something of yourself. |
rockarollacola
08.16.25 | 3 unfortunately |
TheSonomaDude
08.16.25 | " The black album is the biggest influence in the downfall of music. Nearly single-handedly destroyed any sort of integrity metal had almost overnight."
lmao people dramatize the black album as if it were the fall of Rome. |
RVAHC13
08.16.25 | Black album is middle of the road for me, not terribly bad, not terribly good either. I feel the same way about Youthanasia, White Noise and and Divine Intervention. Definitely doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets |
rockarollacola
08.17.25 | "lmao people dramatize the black album as if it were the fall of Rome."
true, that dude is a virgin
|
samwise2000
08.28.25 | guns n roses are the most overrated band ever |
Jurtz
08.28.25 | Agreed, Samwise Gamgee |
