The Best Album by 11 Post-Grunge Bands

What are the best albums by some of the biggest post-grunge bands?

Post-grunge may sound a bit self-explanatory, but it’s doesn’t simply include every rock band that got big after the Seattle grunge scene slowed down in the mid-’90s. Hard rock splintered in a couple of different directions by the middle of the decade, with nu-metal and post-grunge probably being the two biggest subgenres.

The main distinction between grunge and post-grunge isn’t just the timeframe, but the simplification of its sound. Many of the post-grunge bands were influenced by Nirvana, Alice In Chains and their contemporaries and you can hear a lot of elements from those bands in post-grunge music.

But what this newer wave of bands did was refine the sound — less fuzz and distortion, regular time signatures and simpler songwriting optimized for radio. They still had the introspective lyrics, the attitude and the moodiness, but set their songs up for success.

READ MORE: The ‘Big 4’ Bands of Post-Grunge

Everyone won — angsty fans still got their emotionally-charged anthems and the bands became popular much faster than their predecessors did.

So let’s take a look at the best albums by each of the big post-grunge bands.

Post-grunge covers a much wider timeframe than grunge did because a lot of the artists from the former subgenre are still actively making music and touring today. Thus, some of the best albums on this list might have come out in the mid ’90s, and others, the mid-to-late-2000s.

Keep scrolling to see them all.

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