“This is it, folks. The start of a genuine phenomenon”: The best metal debut album from every year of the 1990s

Whereas many grunge bands had mostly punk influences, Alice In Chains were unashamedly a heavy metal band. Originally something of a glammed-up Guns N’ Roses, AIC’s eventual musical and visual make-over paid off immediately.

Facelift, in 1990, was the first grunge album to leave an impression on the charts (thanks to the success of MTV hit Man In The Box), paving the way for Nevermind, Ten and Badmotorfinger, all of which followed AIC’s debut up the charts in the ensuing months.

Faith No More sounded like Abba next to frontman Mike Patton’s other band. Their debut album was unsettling and utterly, utterly brilliant.

It showed a generation of burgeoning noiseniks that heavy music didn't have to be heavy all of the time – instead it could be cinematic and expansive, it could be funny, it could be technical and non-technical, all within the same song. Fun, offensive, dark and chaotic and a blueprint for a generation of musicians whose minds had really been opened to how experimental and agenda-setting heavy music could really be.

Rage Against The Machine’s debut was a Molotov cocktail exploding in the face of popular culture. Nearly 30 years on, its flames still burn brightly, having lost none of its power, impact or provocative fervour. It was the sound of Public Enemy yoked to Black Flag, of Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X set to a soundtrack of cutting-edge metal.

Rage arrived as the MTV-driven rock scene of the 1980s was flat on the canvas with bluebirds fluttering around its head, laid out by the emergent grunge movement. In America, a new generation of hip hop bands was providing a vital social commentary, marrying the gritty reality of the streets with the violent glamour of a Hollywood crime blockbuster.

All this was happening against a backdrop of global turmoil, racial tension and the threat of war. In hindsight, their timing was perfect – in reality, their message is still as pertinent now as it was then.

Cynic’s central duo of guitarist/singer Paul Masdival and drummer Sean Reinert served their apprenticeship on Florida’s death metal underground, but by the time debut album Focus was released in 1993, their band had become something else entirely.

Visionary songs such as Veil Of Maya and I’m But A Wave To… melded visionary extreme metal jaggedness, proggy rhythms and spacey jazz, marked out from what their contemporaries were up to by Masdival’s Vocodered vocals and four-string maestro Sean Malone liquid fretless bass and Chapman Stick experiments. It sounded like nothing else in 1993. Almost 30 years on, it still doesn’t.

‘Are you ready?!’ roars Jonathan Davis on awesome opener Blind, millions of eager would-be nu metal fans gave their response by rapidly turning Korn into one of the world’s biggest bands.

When this debut album appeared, no one had a name for the nascent genre that was about to re-animate the corpse of metal after the beating dished out by grunge.

Their first and best, this is a stormer, featuring some of the heaviest, dirtiest riffs ever recorded, a bottom end so heavy it could anchor an aircraft carrier, and a frontman who would raise the articulation of adolescent angst into a bile-fuelled art form.

Nu metal wasn’t a thing until Korn and Deftones arrived on the scene and changed everything. While both bands were responsible for shifting metal’s aesthetics, Korn dealt pain and angst. Whereas Deftones on Adrenaline showcased influences from hip hop to skate punk. Bored and 7 Words became anthems of youthful alienation for a whole new group of kids, who were tired of grunge and wanted their own sound. With Adrenaline, they got it.

Previously a member of both the UK’s Carcass and his own death metal crew Carnage, guitarist Michael Amott opted for a technical upgrade for his next project.

Arch Enemy’s debut album reworked the melodic sensibilities and ferocity of the Gothenburg death metal scene into something far heavier and catchier.

Black Earth will still take your scalp today: songs like Bury Me An Angel and Fields Of Desolation were undeniably born in the underground, but Arch Enemy were already displaying plenty of ambition and class too.

HIM’s debut album is essentially a love letter to their goth heroes Type O Negative and remains one of their heaviest to date, with a hefty dose of Satanic rock’n’roll symbolism in song titles like Your Sweet Six Six Six and Our Diabolikal Rapture. Plus, it gave us a metal version of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game that managed to be as seductive as the original, as well as the stunning When Love And Death Embrace – one of their best-loved songs and a favourite set closer, with Moog synthesizer wails as its refrain and a buttery vocal performance from young Ville.

If the self-absorbed angst and frat-boy hi-jinks of nu metal gets to be too much, then try this stunning, politically charged and critically lauded debut from a band so way out there it hurts.

System Of A Down’s heritage is writ large throughout, from the spiky lyrics – P.L.U.C.K. is about the Armenian genocide – to the flashes of folky melodies decorating these 13 driving and twisted slabs of noise. But what really sells this is the sheer demented theatricality of it all. The groovy wackiness of each and every song puts SOAD completely in a league of their own.

This is it, folks: the start of a genuine phenomenon. The point where nu metal almost swallowed the world whole. And it all started off in Des Moines, Iowa, the arsehole of nowhere. The frustration and alienation captured by Slipknot on their debut album struck a resounding chord with metal fans hungry for the next extreme sonic outrage. And outrage was exactly what they got. Squealing, scratching volleys ricochet off grinding, bullet-proof thrash riffs while a rhythm section hammers away in titanic triplicate. Nasty, brutish, overwhelmingly nihilistic but utterly mesmerising.