3 Amazing Bands That We Wouldn’t Have Without Nirvana’s Influence

Nirvana’s influence in grunge and alternative rock as a whole has inspired musicians for decades now. And without Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic’s legendary 90s band, we probably wouldn’t have some amazing artists today. Let’s look at a few now-famous musicians and bands who might have never made it big without Nirvana!

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Deftones

Deftones were around and pretty successful during the grunge era of the 1990s. However, one might wonder if Deftones and similar alt-metal and shoegaze outfits would have become as popular as they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s without the significant change that Nirvana enacted in the 1990s.

Before Nirvana, alternative rock and radically different, darker tunes weren’t exactly mainstream chart fodder. Cobain and his band changed that, and I can’t help but think that Deftones’ genuinely amazing album Around The Fur wouldn’t have hit the Top 40 without the mainstream-ification of alt-rock. Plus, I think Chino Moreno sounds a bit similar to Cobain, but maybe that’s just me.

Paramore

I’m sure an actual music historian could do a better job of connecting the dots between rock and roll, grunge, and pop-punk from the mid-20th century through the early 2000s than I ever could. To put it simply, without the grunge explosion of the 1990s, I doubt that much of pop-punk’s success as a genre in the early aughts would have happened. And, thus, the beloved pop-punk outfit Paramore likely wouldn’t have made it big.

Just as well, Paramore’s MTV Unplugged set visually mirrored Nirvana’s candlelit, almost ominous creative choice for their own set, so it’s hard to argue that Nirvana didn’t directly influence Paramore.

Arctic Monkeys

Arctic Monkeys, on the surface, couldn’t be more different from Nirvana musically. Nirvana was American grunge, through and through. English outfit Arctic Monkeys have bounced around from indie rock to post-punk revival regularly since their debut in 2002. However, Nirvana’s influence is definitely there. Both bands have a heavy sound, and both boast frontmen with strong songwriting and lyrical prowess.

There are more direct links, too. When it came to Suck It And See, Arctic Monkeys’ famous fourth studio album, the band recorded the record at the same studio where Nirvana recorded Nevermind. They also took a very similar approach to recording, and Alex Turner confirmed this.

“‘Nevermind’ was the big draw when we were choosing the studio,” said Turner. “There’s this engineer who is still there [from the ‘Nevermind’ days], a serious guy, who we respected. We had to really try and not break out into messing around with any Nirvana covers.”

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