Between the arrival of a new album from Silver Dollar Room and a new single from up and coming band Wird, it’s started to feel as if the last quarter of 2024 is spawning a grungy revival. Here’s something else that fits the bill. Aussie rockers Hello Enemy can be heard channelling Silverchair on bits of their current single ‘Hit Or Miss’.
Formed during the pandemic of 2020, Wird are a London based band who revel in big riffs and grungy noises. Taking various influences from the 90s, they shared their ‘Screwed’ debut in 2022, which immediately cast itself in a Puddle of Mudd vein with its post-Nirvana Cobain-isms, and chugging approach, before ‘Clown’ took the band into slightly heavier climes with the aid of copious amounts of feedback and a sludgy guitar riff that equalled a number of second division grunge acts.
After Geffen Records scored an unexpected commercial and financial success with Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ album in 1991, other major labels began to scour the Seattle area, convinced that the city and its surrounding towns would result in a similar brand of ‘Teen Spirit’. By 1993, around the time that Seattle Fever had reached its peak, pretty much every band who’d been name checked by Kurt Cobain or other important figures had made the leap from indie cool to bigger things. Even supposed second division acts like Tad found themselves signed to major contracts. Looking back, it could be argued that a lot of these bands didn’t quite have the impact the labels had desired, but these major deals certainly elevated their profiles.
Following the massive success of Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ album at the end of 1991, the major labels turned their attention to Seattle and the surrounding areas hoping to sign “the next big thing”. Bands that’d been working hard on an underground scene suddenly found themselves thrown in the spotlight as the musical tide turned. Screaming Trees signed a deal with Epic Records and subsequently released their three finest albums (including the career defining ‘Sweet Oblivion’); Tad moved up the ranks from Sub Pop to the East/West label and even Melvins – previously considered an almost unmarketable commodity – struck a three album deal with Ahmet Ertegun’s legendary Atlantic Records.
On their second EP ‘Six Pack’, self-confessed “slacker rock” Parisians Normcore are here to remind you of the Reading Festival mud-bath of 1992 and the long, hot summer of 1995. On a spirited homage to various distorted indie rock heroes from decades past, its six songs recycle the best bits of early Weezer, Dinosaur Jr., Superchunk and Pavement with a loving charm, but a heavy French accent throughout gives this distortion-loving quartet a slightly different slant on an overly familiar sound.