Bleak, angry and overall angst-ridden, the band's 1994 debut helped create the nu-metal genre. Focusing on topics like drug use and abuse, Korn's angry music reached out to the millions of angst-ridden kids the world over.
04. Jimmy Eat World - Clarity
To me, this album, along with Weezer's Pinkerton, helped carve out the depressed-teenager genre of emo. Riveting, emotional and a wonderful listen, Jimmy Eat World created the best album of their catalog and possibly one of the best albums of the '90s.
03. Within Temptation - Mother Earth
Easily the most essential symphonic metal record, Within Temptation abandoned the death-metal growls on their debut album and drew on Celtic influences. Relying a lot on the eerie, perfect vocals of lead singer Sharon Del Adel, this album catapulted the band to international fame and secured their place in symphonic metal history.
02. Children Of Bodom - Hate Crew Deathroll
Extreme metal is mostly a Scandinavian affair and is almost always underground material. But these guys from Finland took a mainstream-oriented approach, infusing melodic playing with fierce sounds, and came up with one of the best albums for any extreme metal lover and arguably the best of their career.
01. Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
Trent Reznor is a sick, twisted genius. Everyone who listens to industrial rock can tell you this. But this album showed a stunned world that he was also capable of producing timeless classics. Easily the best industrial rock album of all time, Reznor delves into a world of paranoia, delusion and insanity with such conviction that it is almost impossible not to feel the paranoia when listening to the album. Folie a deux, people.
Article comments
1 - El Bicho
Nice list, but is one paragraph for each album really exhaustive?
2 - Tolu
My bad. Sorry for the oversight.
3 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
"...the albums I feel have come to define each genre of rock music."
Then how do you pick Children of Bodom over DEATH?? Never mind the fact that Chuck Shuldiner had already defined Death Metal back in '87 with "Scream Bloody Gore", DEATH was also one of the bands (from the US) that laid out the blueprints for all future extreme music in 1993 with "Individual Thought Patterns". His ability to intertwine melody with such technical movements really showed how complex this genre of music could get.
But, even when talking about the year 2001, a little Swedish band named Opeth dropped another defining moment on extreme music history entitled "Blackwater Park" which showed the music world what Death Metal might sound like had Pink Floyd stumbled upon a time machine. This album really showcased beautiful songwriting that had a range of emotion with top notch production.
4 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
BTW, "The Downward Spiral" was your most accurate pick. Plus, if you wanted to be exhaustive, you could have mentioned that it was one of the first electronic albums on vinyl to be rated by Stereophile magazine back in 1995 for its production value.
5 - Tolu
Extreme metal is NOT death metal. This list is not complete, it's in parts
6 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
"Extreme metal is NOT death metal"
I never said that it was, but it is an "umbrella" term for extreme genres including Death Metal.