Dirt by Alice In Chains

Dirt, Alice in Chains' second album, came out on Columbia on September 29, 1992, and it's a bleak, crushing record that somehow became a mainstream smash. Dave Jerden produced it, and it was the last album with all four original members: bassist Mike Starr was fired in January 1993, out on the road behind it.

Jerry Cantrell wrote most of the songs, his guitars grinding like tectonic plates, but Layne Staley wrote two on his own for the first time, "Hate to Feel" and "Angry Chair", and played guitar on them too. And Staley's voice sounds like a man singing from the bottom of a well. The subject matter is unflinching: depression, pain, rage, isolation, war, death and addiction, heroin above all. "Them Bones" snaps like a trap, "Rooster" is a slow, battle-scarred crawl, "Down in a Hole" is a haunted ballad, and "Would?" pounds and prowls. Slayer's Tom Araya even drops in to roar on "Iron Gland".

Critics loved it. It climbed as high as number 6 on the Billboard 200, spawned five singles, all with videos, picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance and went five-times platinum, the band's biggest seller. It is regularly named a landmark of the grunge years, and its 30th anniversary reissue in 2022 sent it back into the Billboard top 10 at number 9.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.