Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
Mayhem are one of the most influential black metal bands on the planet, and their album De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas remains a timeless classic.
Mayhem's boldest album was almost overshadowed by the death of mainman Euronymous. Yet the biggest testament to its artistic value is perhaps the fact that discussion of its recording, songwriting and performance qualities continues to outweigh the highly notable circumstances of its creation. Sinister and menacing, this was a fitting epitaph.
Megadeth - Youthanasia
Many fans baulked at Megadeth’s deliberate drift into less thrashy, more radio-friendly mainstream territory, but with hindsight Youthanasia is a very strong record and one that makes a lot more sense than the similarly-inclined but genuinely dreadful Super Collider.
Some of the band’s finest ‘90s cuts are contained within: Train Of Consequences, Addicted To Chaos, Reckoning Day and A Tout Le Monde are all certified monsters and Blood Of Heroes is one of the great unsung Megadeth tunes. Their last truly great album for more than a decade.
Melvins - Stoner Witch
After the tumultuous creation of Houdini in 1993, Melvins went completely the opposite direction for the making of Stoner Witch. Recorded in 19 days with producer GGGarth Richardson, Stoner Witch repurposed the sludgy heft of Melvins' early work with the classic rock they so clearly loved.
Revolve and Magic Pig Detective come off like the band trying hard to supress their love for 70s and 80s enormodome rock and failing delightfully. The ambiant Shevil and Lividty show a surprisingly mellow side of the band, worlds away from their punk/noise roots.
Nailbomb – Nailbomb
Off the back of Sepultura’s Beneath The Remains, Arise and Chaos A.D., Max Cavalera’s stock couldn’t be much higher. So when he teamed up with Alex Newport from Nottingham noise provocatuers Fudge Tunnel as Nailbomb, fans expected something special. And they got it.
Point Blank is a frightening record, with Cavalera’s love of early death and thrash metal being amped up and combined with Newport’s ear for industrialised, avant-garde extremity. Wasted Away has become an underground classic, and song like Cockroaches and Blind And Lost still sound as heavy as anything you care to mention today.
Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
The point where Trent Reznor went from snotty electro-punk to industrial metal emperor, one man’s fucked-up mind has never sounded so cool.
Recorded at the address where actress Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family, The Downward Spiral paints a chilling portrait of societal, moral and personal collapse.
Influenced by David Bowie’s Low, and constructed from heavily processed guitar sounds, glacial electronics and distorted samples, its nightmarish atmospherics are enhanced by Reznor’s man-on-the-edge musings on religion, addiction, degradation and despair.
The Downward Spiral is unremittingly bleak, utterly believable and unquestionably Reznor’s finest hour.
Pantera - Far Beyond Driven
The follow-up to Vulgar Display Of Power made its predecessor sound like Mr Blobby. Still the heaviest album to reach Number One in the US, it rocketed the band’s seemingly never-ending touring schedule into the arenas.
With Far Beyond Driven, Pantera had truly arrived. Sure, the songs aren’t quite as good as those featured on Vulgar Display Of Power, and in the likes of Good Friends And A Bottle Of Pills and their inclusion of a cover of Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan there are even hints Pantera might be running out of ideas.
But the likes of Strength Beyond Strength, the Grammy-nominated I’m Broken and the quite malevolent Slaughtered proved that Pantera were still adept at creating near-lethal metal. Commercially they’d never be as big again, but the cracks would soon show.
Rollins Band - Weight
The Rollins Band’s fourth album is the work of a band at the peak of their powers. The ex-Black Flag singer himself was raging as hard as he ever did on the likes of Disconnect and the seething, sarcastic Liar, but the group – now featuring jazz bassist Melvin Gibbs – had extra space and depth to their sound.
The album’s most intense moment came in the shape of Volume 4, dedicated to the memory of Rollins’ murdered best friend, Joe Cole. Named after the pair's favourite Black Sabbath album, it finds Rollins raging over Haskett and Gibbs’ dense, unrelenting riffs: “I've seen the sidewalk bleed and I watched the mother cry, I used to have a mind, I used to wonder why, but now I go from day to day and wait around to die like he did.” Heavy, in every sense of the word.
Soundgarden - Superunknown
A critical and commercial hit, Superunknown catapulted Soundgarden into the mainstream without compromising any of their artistic integrity. Their palette might have had more colours than had been displayed on previous albums like the muscular Louder Than Love, and there were psychedelic echoes in some of the record’s grooves, but in songs like Let Me Drown and Like Suicide Soundgarden’s pile-driver approach endured.
The album was informed by Sylvia Plath’s poetry, and the album’s smash hit Black Hole Sun came with a video that felt like the bleakest of acid trips.
Therapy? - Troublegum
Therapy’s second full-length album offers a near-perfect synthesis of the ingredients that sit at the Northern Irish trio’s core: a harmonious balance of punk simplicity, metal physicality and indie cool.
Ditching the noise-rock so prevalent in the band’s earlier releases, it instead piled on the twisted pop sensibilities that turned damn near every track into a bona fide anthem: Screamager, Nowhere, Turn, a steel-edged cover of Joy Division’s Isolation… every track is a gem. It remains their most enduring album, its songs still dominating their live shows nearly 30 years after its release.
Various Artists – The Crow: OST
The soundtrack to cult comic book adaption The Crow is the perfect snapshot of the music scene in 1994. The movie’s goth-adjacent atmosphere was captured in The Cure’s brooding Wish and Nine Inch Nails’ tense cover of early New Order classic Dead Souls, Rage Against The Machine and Pantera brough the aggro with Darkness and a romp through Poison Idea’s anti-cop broadside The Badge, and Henry Rollins, Helmet and Stone Temple Pilots all contributed stellar songs.
But it’s the less well-known names that are more fascinating, not least the long forgotten For Love Not Lisa’s spiralling Slip Slide Melting. Trent Reznor’s flashy Natural Born Killers soundtrack hoovered up the plaudits in 1994, but, track for track, this is its equal.
