Who Were the First Grunge Bands?

Reading time: 8 minutes

Ask who invented heavy metal and you get an argument. Ask who the first grunge bands were and you get three arguments, each with real evidence behind it. Green River recorded Come On Down, the usual "first grunge record" claim, in December 1984. The Melvins made the stylistic move first, slowing hardcore punk to a crawl in 1984 after hearing the second side of Black Flag's My War. And the Deep Six compilation (C/Z Records, March 1986) was the first document to put the whole Seattle scene on one slab of vinyl. This page lays out each case with dates and sources and declines to crown a winner, because the record itself declines to. The wider scene map lives at our grunge bands hub; this page covers only the origin question, properly.

One disclosure before the history: this site belongs to the team behind Daemon Grey, a Canadian metal artist whose sound carries a grunge thread. He has no entry on this page. Judge the history on its evidence.

The Word Before the Sound

The strangest fact in grunge history is that the name predates the music. In 1981, a young Mark Arm wrote a letter to the Seattle zine Desperate Times using the word "grunge" to mock his own band, Mr. Epp and the Calculations. It was an insult, aimed at himself, six years before anyone marketed a Seattle sound. The word resurfaced in 1987, when Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt described Green River's Dry As a Bone EP in an early catalogue as "ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation." That catalogue line is the first documented use of the term for the sound itself. So the coinage question has a clean answer even though the first-band question does not: Arm supplied the word, Pavitt attached it to the music, and the man who wrote it as a joke in 1981 ended up fronting two of the bands it came to describe.

The Pre-History: Wipers and the U-Men

Before any Seattle band played a note of it, the ingredients existed down the road in Portland. The Wipers, formed in 1977 by guitarist Greg Sage, put out Is This Real? in 1980: tight songs under walls of heavy distortion, recorded years before "grunge" meant anything. Nobody calls the Wipers a grunge band, but the bands that became grunge treated them as source code. Nirvana covered several Wipers songs, and the debt is audible any time Bleach is on.

Inside Seattle, the bridge was the U-Men, formed in 1980 and active through 1989. Their records were noisy, dirty and theatrical rather than heavy in the metal sense, which is why they rarely top anyone's "first grunge band" list. But they were the biggest draw in Seattle's underground during the years the younger bands were forming, and they stand as the scene's direct forerunner: one of the six bands on Deep Six, and one of only two on it who had recorded before. If "first grunge band" means "first band of the scene that produced grunge," the U-Men have a case nobody else can make.

The Melvins and the Slowdown

The Melvins formed in Montesano, Washington in 1983, as a fast hardcore band fronted by Buzz Osborne. The pivot came in 1984, when they heard side two of Black Flag's My War: three long, grinding tracks closer to doomed metal than to hardcore. The Melvins took the hint further than Black Flag did, slowing everything down until punk aggression and Black Sabbath weight fused into something new. Their Six Songs EP followed in 1986. The case for the Melvins as the first grunge band is stylistic: they made the defining move, the slowdown, before anyone else in the region, and a teenage Kurt Cobain was famously in their orbit in Aberdeen. The case against is that the result is usually filed as sludge rather than grunge, and their first EP arrived after Green River's. First sound, not first record.

Green River and Come On Down

Green River hold the strongest paper claim. Formed in Seattle in 1984, fronted by Mark Arm, with Steve Turner and Stone Gossard on guitars and Jeff Ament on bass, they recorded the Come On Down EP at Crow Studios in December 1984; Homestead Records released it in November 1985. It mixed punk, garage rock and heavy metal in exactly the proportions the genre would settle on, and it reached shops before the Melvins' debut EP and before Deep Six. That sequence is why Come On Down is routinely called the first grunge record. The honest footnotes: it sold poorly, the term did not yet exist, and calling one EP the genre's origin gives a scene's work to a single release. What is beyond dispute is the family tree. When Green River split in 1987, Arm and Turner formed Mudhoney, while Ament and Gossard formed Mother Love Bone and later Pearl Jam. One band, both halves of grunge's future.

Deep Six: The Scene's First Document

If no single band can claim the origin, one record can claim the scene. Deep Six, recorded at Ironwood Studios in August and September 1985 and released 21 March 1986, was the first catalogue number (CZ001) on Seattle's C/Z Records: 2,000 copies, compiled by Chris Hanzsek and Tina Casale. Six bands appear: Green River, the Melvins, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, Soundgarden and the U-Men. For every act except Green River and the U-Men it was their first time on record, which means the debut recordings of Soundgarden, the Melvins and Malfunkshun (fronted by Andrew Wood, later of Mother Love Bone) all sit on one compilation. It sold modestly and is now treated as the scene's founding document: the moment the heavy, slow, punk-rooted Seattle sound was audibly a movement rather than a coincidence. Two years later, on 1 April 1988, Sub Pop incorporated and gave that movement a label and a marketing voice.

Mudhoney and the Word Made Flesh

The last contender arrives late but matters. Mudhoney formed in 1988 from the wreckage of two contenders above: Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Green River, plus Matt Lukin of the Melvins and drummer Dan Peters. Their debut single "Touch Me I'm Sick", recorded with producer Jack Endino at Reciprocal Recording in April 1988 and released by Sub Pop that August, is the first record that was recorded, marketed and received as grunge, word and sound finally attached. The Superfuzz Bigmuff EP followed the same year. Mudhoney were nobody's first band chronologically, but they were the first band the label fit while it was happening, which is its own kind of first. For where they and everyone above sit inside the city's larger story, our Seattle grunge bands guide maps the whole scene.

The Contenders, Side by Side

Contender	The claim	The evidence
Wipers	The sound before the scene	Is This Real? (1980, Portland); covered by Nirvana
U-Men	First band of the Seattle scene itself	Formed 1980; the underground's biggest local draw; on Deep Six
Melvins	First to make the defining stylistic move	Slowed down in 1984 after Black Flag's My War; Six Songs EP 1986
Green River	First grunge record	Come On Down: recorded Dec 1984, released Nov 1985 (Homestead)
Deep Six (compilation)	First document of the scene as a scene	C/Z CZ001, 21 Mar 1986; six bands, recorded at Ironwood 1985
Mudhoney	First band recorded and sold as "grunge"	"Touch Me I'm Sick" (Sub Pop, Aug 1988); Superfuzz Bigmuff

The Honest Verdict

Every version of "who was first" answers a different question. First record: Green River. First sound: the Melvins. First scene: the U-Men and, before them, the Wipers. First collective proof: Deep Six. First band the word actually described in real time: Mudhoney. The scholarship supports leaving it plural. The historian Steve Waksman argues in This Ain't the Summer of Love (University of California Press, 2009) that punk and metal had been crossing into each other since the early 1970s, with the Seattle scene as the point where that long conflict finally fused, an outcome of a fifteen-year process rather than one garage's invention. And the sociologist Catherine Strong, whose work examines how grunge gets remembered, describes the genre as a Seattle and Sub Pop-centred cross of punk and heavy metal that broke to mass scale only when Nevermind (24 September 1991) unexpectedly hit; her research also shows how short canonical lists flatten what scenes actually looked like. A page that crowned one inventor would be tidier. It would also be wrong, and this catalogue of competing firsts is the truer story: a small city full of bands arriving at the same heaviness from different directions, on records people can still buy. In Mark Yarm's oral history Everybody Loves Our Town, built from over 250 interviews with the people involved, the participants themselves cannot agree either. That is the answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was the first grunge band?

There is no clean documentary answer. Green River made the earliest record usually called grunge (Come On Down, 1985), the Melvins pioneered the slowed-down sound in 1984, and the U-Men predate both inside Seattle's scene. Historians present these as competing firsts rather than crowning a single inventor.

What was the first grunge record?

The usual claim is Green River's Come On Down EP, recorded in December 1984 and released on Homestead Records in November 1985, ahead of the Melvins' debut EP. The first multi-band grunge record is the Deep Six compilation, released by Seattle's C/Z Records on 21 March 1986.

Who coined the term grunge?

Mark Arm used "grunge" in a 1981 letter to the Seattle zine Desperate Times, mocking his own band Mr. Epp and the Calculations. Sub Pop's Bruce Pavitt attached the word to the sound in 1987, describing Green River's Dry As a Bone as "ultra-loose GRUNGE" in a label catalogue.

Was Nirvana the first grunge band?

No. Nirvana released their debut album Bleach in 1989, three years after the Deep Six compilation and four after Green River's Come On Down. Nirvana were the band that carried grunge to a global audience with Nevermind in 1991, not the band that started it.

What bands were on the Deep Six compilation?

Six Seattle bands: Green River, the Melvins, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, Soundgarden and the U-Men. Released 21 March 1986 as C/Z Records' first catalogue number, CZ001, it was the debut recording for every act except Green River and the U-Men, and is regarded as the scene's founding document.

Sources

• Steve Waksman, This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009). Google Books
• Catherine Strong, “Grunge, Riot Grrrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture”, The Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 2 (2011): 398–416. Open-access text
• Mark Yarm, Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge (Crown Archetype, 2011). Publisher
• “Deep Sixed: The Making of the First Grunge Compilation”, Northwest Passage.
• Deep Six LP release data (C/Z Records, 1986), Discogs.