3 British Bands That Sound Like American Bands

The rock bands on this list are all British, but they all sound American. While no one will confuse Gavin Rossdale, Joe Elliott, or Mick Jagger with a Yankee, they each front groups with a distinctly American sound.

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Much of it has to do with accents. American artists also inspired The Beatles, but John Lennon and Paul McCartney still sang like musicians from Liverpool who’d studied American records. Meanwhile, The Kinks, Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Smiths, and Oasis leaned into their Britishness with strong accents and local references.

In the mid-1960s, the British Invasion exported British culture to the United States with bands who’d scoured record bins for then-underground American music. These Brit rockers wouldn’t be the same without American blues, country, and early rock and roll. Thirty years later, grunge and alternative rock created a backlash movement in the U.K. called Britpop. Yet, some Brits leaned further into Seattle’s cultural dominance and gave it new life as the genre began to fade.

Bush

Gavin Rossdale wasn’t interested in Britpop. While Oasis and Blur duked it out in the charts, Rossdale instead looked to Pixies and the same quiet/loud song formula that inspired Nirvana. Radiohead’s “Creep” was also built using this blueprint, but they still sounded British. Bush did not. Rossdale took his cues from American alternative rock and even quoted Jane’s Addiction in “Everything Zen”. Sixteen Stone and Razorblade Suitcase kept grunge alive well into its “post” period with hits like “Glycerine”, “Machinehead”, and “Swallowed”.

Def Leppard

Early on, Def Leppard was considered part of the new wave of British heavy metal. However, their greatest success came amid the popularity of hair metal in the mid-to-late 1980s. With back-to-back blockbuster albums, Pyromania and Hysteria, Def Leppard became one of the biggest-selling rock bands in the world. Though drummer Rick Allen often sported Union Jack shorts, singer Joe Elliott delivered the hits without a British accent. With producer Mutt Lange, Def Leppard also shaped country music’s pop and rock turn in the 1990s, most notably with Shania Twain.

The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones became the most successful of the British blues revivalists from the 1960s. Muddy Waters’ tune “Rollin’ Stone” gave the band its name, and the American South provided the sound. Inspired by Waters, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones helped bring American roots music back to its own country. After hanging out with Gram Parsons, the Stones adopted a country-rock sound on “Wild Horses”, forever changing rock and roll. Before that, Ry Cooder introduced Keith Richards to the open G guitar tuning, which formed Richards’s droning riffs on “Brown Sugar”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, and “Start Me Up”.

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