The Best Song off Every ‘Big 4’ Grunge Album

Here are our picks for the best song off every “Big 4” grunge album.

The “Big 4” is a term that was initially used to describe the four biggest thrash metal bands in the world: Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer and Megadeth. But we’ve since translated the term across all different rock and metal subgenres because many of them do have a specific handful of bands that represented the scene the best.

We acknowledge that many fans don’t like genre labels and especially don’t like the word “grunge,” but for this list’s purpose (and all of our other grunge lists), it spans all of the bands that formed and rose to prominence in the Seattle area during the mid-to-late-’80s and early ’90s.

So, who make up the Big 4 of grunge? Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam — four bands from the Pacific Northwest that found mainstream success in the ’90s and have each had a monumental influence on rock ‘n’ roll in one way or another.

Soundgarden and Nirvana both put albums out in the late ’80s, but Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam didn’t share full-length releases until the early ’90s. Nirvana sadly had the shortest discography of all of the groups and Pearl Jam, unsurprisingly, have the longest.

READ MORE: The Best Album by 14 Grunge Bands

Alice In Chains and Soundgarden both took long breaks from the late ’90s to the 2000s for different reasons, but eventually put out 21st century albums again.

As fantastic as many of these bands’ standalone singles and EPs were (we’re looking at you, Jar of Flies), we opted to only include full studio albums for this list.

As of now, the list ends with Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter (2024), but Soundgarden are allegedly almost finished with their final album that they were working on when Chris Cornell died in 2017. Once that’s out, or another fro Alice In Chains, we’ll be able to update this.