🎸 Top 10 Underrated Grunge Tracks You Forgot You Loved (CommonX Edition)

Top 10 Underrated Grunge Tracks we forgot we loved. Brought to you by Skull Candy and CommonX.

By CommonX

Before playlists and polished pop, we had distortion, sweat, and heartache echoing from basements and bar stages. Grunge wasn’t a sound — it was a generation finally saying, “We’re not okay, and that’s okay.”

Everyone remembers Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but the underground had deeper veins — songs that hit just as hard and spoke louder in the quiet moments between chaos.

So fire up the SONOS, close your eyes, and fall back into the feedback. Here are the 10 underrated grunge anthems that still deserve to shake your soul.

⚡ 10. Screaming Trees – “Nearly Lost You” (1992)

That voice. That fuzz. That groove. The soundtrack to smoky nights and restless hearts — forever under-appreciated.

🎤 9. Mother Love Bone – “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” (1990)

Where it all began. Before Pearl Jam, there was MLB — poetic, tragic, and pure Seattle soul.

🔥 8. Mudhoney – “Touch Me I’m Sick” (1988)

The filthy riff that started it all. Raw, snotty, and brilliant — the sound that gave Sub Pop its swagger.

🎧 7. Temple of the Dog – “Say Hello 2 Heaven” (1991)

Chris Cornell’s voice in its purest form — grief turned into grace. A tribute that became a movement.

🌀 6. L7 – “Pretend We’re Dead” (1992)

Feminist fury meets killer hooks. L7 proved you didn’t need to smile to melt faces.

💔 5. Candlebox – “You” (1993)

Melodic, emotional, and criminally underrated. Candlebox gave grunge a pulse that could actually break hearts.

⚙️ 4. The Melvins – “Hooch” (1993)

Heavy, sludgy, hypnotic. The godfathers of doom who inspired Nirvana’s heaviest moments.

🧠 3. Soundgarden – “Room a Thousand Years Wide” (1991)

Buried behind the hits lies one of their best riffs. Cornell and Thayil made darkness sound divine.

🚀 2. Alice in Chains – “Nutshell” (1994)

If you ever doubted grunge had poetry, listen again. Layne’s voice still echoes in every lonely apartment at 2 a.m.

🦇 1. Stone Temple Pilots – “Silvergun Superman” (1994)

Overshadowed by hits like “Plush,” this deep cut is pure STP swagger — bassline grooves, velvet vocals, and a solo that burns slow.

🎧 Honorable Mentions

Nirvana – “Aneurysm” | Pearl Jam – “Release” | Hole – “Malibu” | Bush – “Cold Contagious”

🧠 Excerpt

CommonX digs deep into the Seattle sound — the forgotten grunge tracks that still roar beneath the surface. Crank it, feel it, and remember why it mattered.

written by Ian Primmer

“The Soundtrack Still Matters (SONOS Edition)”

There was a time when every moment had its own soundtrack.
A first kiss in a friend’s car to the hum of a worn cassette. A late-night skate run with Smells Like Teen Spirit echoing off the streetlights. A broken-hearted walk home with your Discman skipping on track eight.

Music didn’t just play in the background — it defined who we were. Back then, we lived for mixtapes. The sound was fuzzy, imperfect, sometimes barely holding together — but it was ours. Every hiss, every crackle, every dropout told a story. You didn’t swipe through songs, you committed to them. You let the music breathe.

And maybe that’s what we’ve lost in the streaming age — the texture, the ritual, the pause between tracks that reminded you something real was coming next. But here’s the truth: the sound never died. It just evolved.

From Garage Speakers to SONOS Clarity

We grew up worshipping distortion — basement bands, blown-out speakers, the hum of a dying amp before the chorus dropped. Now, we’re rediscovering what sound can really do when it’s given room to move. That’s where SONOS comes in — the next evolution of that same energy we grew up with. It’s not about perfection — it’s about presence.

“We grew up on grit. SONOS gives it back with grace.”

With SONOS, you don’t just hear the song — you feel it. The air shifts, the bass hums, and the room becomes part of the music again. It’s what happens when design meets soul. From vinyl to streaming, from garage walls to living rooms that shake with nostalgia, SONOS captures the essence of how we used to listen — loud, unfiltered, and alive.

Every CommonX episode we drop, every Side-B track we revisit, deserves that kind of sound — not background noise, but an experience.

Gen X Grew Up, But the Music Didn’t

We traded our Walkmans for Wi-Fi, but the volume never came down. We just wanted a system that respected the music the way we do — not compressed, not disposable, not background noise. That’s what makes the SONOS ecosystem the grown-up version of rebellion: seamless, modern, but still built around sound that moves you. It’s what happens when the mixtape kids grow up, but the passion stays the same.

“We were raised on feedback and rebellion — now we crave fidelity and fire.”

Because we still want that moment — the one where you stop mid-conversation, tilt your head, and say:
“Man, listen to that.”

SONOS didn’t just build a speaker — they built a bridge between who we were and who we became. The soundtrack still matters. It always did. And now, it sounds better than ever.

🎵 Hear your soundtrack the way Gen X meant it to sound.
Shop SONOS

written by Ian Primmer

SONOS Multi Room quality Surround Sound

Follow Ian Primmer GENXDAD on Tiktok, and get some SONOS gear for high quality sound on the SONO links above.

When MTV Played Videos: A Love Letter to Late-Night Beavis and Butt-Head

Before algorithms, before influencers, there were two idiots on a couch who somehow spoke for a generation. This is a look back at when MTV still had guts, when Beavis and Butt-Head were our midnight philosophers, and when rock videos meant something.

In the ‘90s, MTV was still dangerous — a little unpredictable, a little punk. You never knew what you’d catch between “Headbangers Ball” and a commercial for JNCO jeans. Then these two idiots appeared: acne, Metallica shirts, and zero attention span. And somehow, that was the attention span of the decade.

Beavis and Butt-Head didn’t just mock music videos — they dissected the absurdity of pop culture without even trying. When they laughed at a Bon Jovi ballad or shredded some random alt-rock band you barely knew, it felt like the world was in on a private joke. And that’s what Gen X did best — laugh at the nonsense while secretly paying attention to the meaning underneath it all.

Those late-night viewings were a rite of passage. We weren’t just watching cartoons; we were learning the language of irony. MTV in that era wasn’t a network, it was a mirror — showing us our boredom, our rebellion, our desire for something real. It was chaos with a remote control, and Mike Judge’s duo gave us permission to laugh through it all.

And the music… man, the music was alive. Nirvana, Soundgarden, White Zombie, Smashing Pumpkins — even the pop garbage had an edge when filtered through Beavis and Butt-Head’s commentary. It was music television the way it was meant to be: unpolished, unpredictable, and soaked in teenage apathy.

Somewhere between then and now, we traded that chaos for “curation.” MTV became reality TV, music moved to the background, and the laughter got replaced with comment sections. But that late-night glow — that raw, dumb, brilliant humor — shaped how a whole generation sees the world today. We’re skeptical, sarcastic, self-aware… and still laughing at the system.

So yeah — this one’s for the night owls who kept the volume low so the folks wouldn’t wake up. For the ones who didn’t need a filter to find what was cool. For the ones who still hear “Breaking the Law” and crack up thinking of Beavis screaming, “Heh… fire!”

When MTV played videos, we didn’t just watch. We remembered.

Authored by Ian Primmer, Co-host — CommonX