The nineties were the decade where grunge exploded, metal got inventive, and Britrock’s green shoots showed there was plenty to celebrate this side of the Atlantic. But for every Soundgarden there were a dozen Sugartooths, bands who looked right and played right, but – for one reason or another – never made to the finishing line. Here’s five such cases.
Loudmouth
Part of a brief, ill-fated late-90s biker-metal resurgence that also included less-than-hopefuls American Pearl, Chicago’s Loudmouth were very briefly rock’s great new hopes, a sort of Guns N’ Roses for the alt.rock crowd. They recorded one stellar, self-titled album for Hollywood Records in 1999 after Metallica proclaimed their greatness, then rode off into the sunset.
New American Shame
Auburn, Washington’s New American Shame’s stunning self-titled debut (Atlantic Records, 1999), was the last great record of the 1990s, a crunchy, balls-to-the-wall riff-rocker that sounded more like AC/DC than AC/DC did in the 90s. Unfortunately, everybody bought Korn records instead, NAS soon imploded, and a 2010 reunion failed to produce any new recordings.
Asphalt Ballet
One of the first hair-metal-era rock bands to openly move towards darker sounds, San Diego’s Asphalt Ballet may have been the world’s first glam-grunge band. Their two early-90s albums on Virgin Records managed an impressive balancing act between hooky, pyrotechnic glam-metal and dark, bluesy hard rock. Nirvana still killed them, though.
Sugartooth
Sugartooth flirted with the big time – a debut album on Geffen Records, a song in the Howard Stern film Private Parts (backing the shock jock himself) and an animated thumbs-up from 90s tastemakers Beavis & Butt-head – but somehow their deliciously poppy, supremely bummed-out grunge rock failed to light any fires, and they broke up in the wake of 1996's The Sounds Of Solid. Miraculously, a third album, the cleverly-titled Volume 3, emerged in 2023.
Dandelion
It’s a mystery why Dandelion never really hit with the kids. They were cool, had great songs, major-label backing, videos on MTV (including the shabby classic Weird Out) and songs on TV shows and in films. The Philadelphia grungers released I Think I’m Gonna Be Sick in 1993 and Dyslexicon in 1995 – two albums’ worth of smart, hooky, swirling neo-psych slacker rock – before fading out in the mid-90s. A one-off reunion show in 2019 was followed by a memorial set in 2024 after the death of frontman Kevin Morpurgo.
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