Bands Like Alice In Chains

If you want the closest match to Alice in Chains, start with Soundgarden, Mad Season, and Stone Temple Pilots. From there, Screaming Trees, The Melvins, and Days of the New fill in the same dark, heavy, and often acoustic territory that made Alice in Chains sound like nothing else in Seattle. Below are a dozen bands worth adding to your rotation, each with a track to start on and a reason it belongs here.

First, it helps to pin down what "like Alice in Chains" actually means, because the band pulled from two directions at once.

What makes Alice in Chains sound the way it does

Alice in Chains formed in Seattle in 1987 around guitarist Jerry Cantrell and original singer Layne Staley, and they got lumped in with grunge mostly by geography. The sound was heavier and slower than most of their peers. Cantrell writes down-tuned, sludgy riffs that owe more to Black Sabbath doom than to punk, and the band drapes those riffs in close vocal harmonies, first between Staley and Cantrell, and since 2006 between Cantrell and William DuVall. That harmonized, slightly queasy vocal blend is the fingerprint. You hear it on the breakthrough record Dirt (1992), on tracks like "Them Bones," "Rooster," and "Would?"

The other half of the band is quieter and just as important. The 1994 EP Jar of Flies and the earlier Sap showed Alice in Chains could write fragile, mostly acoustic songs, "Nutshell" and "Down in a Hole" among them, without losing the sense of dread. "Would?" is a good shorthand for the whole project: Cantrell wrote it as a tribute to his friend Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone, who died of a heroin overdose in 1990, and it first appeared on the 1992 Singles soundtrack before landing on Dirt. Cantrell sings the verses, Staley takes the chorus, and the lyrics sit in the same territory as most of the band's best work: addiction, guilt, and the people it takes down.

The vocal harmony is worth dwelling on, because it is the hardest part to copy. Staley and Cantrell did not simply double a melody. They sang slightly different lines that scraped against each other, and the tension in that gap is a lot of what makes the band feel uneasy even on their prettier songs. When Staley died in 2002 and William DuVall stepped in from 2006 on, the band kept the formula alive by building the same friction between DuVall and Cantrell. The comeback records prove the sound was never only about one voice: Black Gives Way to Blue (2009), dedicated to Staley, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here (2013), and Rainier Fog (2018) all lean on the same harmonized dread, and the band has sold north of 30 million records across both eras.

So a band "like" Alice in Chains usually hits at least one of three marks: the slow doom-adjacent heaviness, the dark harmonized vocals, or the acoustic melancholy. The dozen below are sorted roughly from closest to furthest, and a few of them are on The Band Index already if you want to dig into their discographies.

The closest matches

Soundgarden

Ask ten Alice in Chains fans for one band and most will say Soundgarden. Same city, same era, same willingness to slow a riff down until it feels like it is dragging something. Chris Cornell's range ran higher than Staley's, but the two bands shared a love of odd time signatures and detuned guitars that pushed grunge toward metal. Badmotorfinger (1991) is the heaviest entry point. Start with "Rusty Cage," then "Outshined," which is about as close to the Dirt mood as another band ever got. If you want the bigger, stranger version, Superunknown (1994) stretches the same ideas across a longer record and gives you "Black Hole Sun" and "Fell on Black Days."

Mad Season

This is the one no serious Alice in Chains fan should skip, because it is partly Alice in Chains. Mad Season was a Seattle side project built in 1994 around Layne Staley on vocals, Pearl Jam's Mike McCready on guitar, Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, and bassist John Baker Saunders, with McCready and Saunders meeting in rehab and pulling Staley in. They made one album, Above (1995), and it is slower and bluesier than Alice in Chains but carries the same haunted weight. The band started a second record that was never finished before Saunders and then Staley died, which gives Above the feeling of a document rather than a debut. "River of Deceit" is the song everyone knows, and it is the right place to begin, with Staley singing some of the most clear-eyed lyrics of his career about the cost of his addiction.

Stone Temple Pilots

Scott Weiland's baritone and the band's thick, swaggering riffs put Stone Temple Pilots in the same conversation from their 1992 debut Core onward. They were a little glammier and more radio-friendly than Alice in Chains, but the DNA overlaps, which is why streaming services keep listing them side by side. "Plush" is the obvious starting point. If you want the heavier cut, "Sex Type Thing" gets there.

Screaming Trees

Another Pacific Northwest band whose singer, Mark Lanegan, moonlighted in Mad Season. The Trees were more psychedelic and rooted in classic rock than Alice in Chains, but Lanegan's cracked, smoke-stained voice lands in the same emotional place as Staley. Sweet Oblivion (1992) is the record, and "Nearly Lost You," which also turned up on that same Singles soundtrack, is the entry point.

The Melvins

If Alice in Chains got their heaviness from somewhere, a lot of it ran through The Melvins, the Washington band who sat at the center point between grunge and doom and influenced half of Seattle, Kurt Cobain included. They are weirder, slower, and more abrasive than Alice in Chains, so think of them as the deep end of the sludge pool. Houdini (1993) is the most approachable record, and "Honey Bucket" is a fair warning of what you are getting into.

Going a little heavier

Trouble

Here is where it pays to follow the riffs backward. Trouble are a Chicago doom-metal band whose 1990 self-titled album, produced by Rick Rubin, married Black Sabbath heaviness to clean, melodic, almost psychedelic vocals. That combination, crushing and tuneful at the same time, is exactly the lineage Alice in Chains drew on for their doomiest material. If "Them Bones" and "Dam That River" are your favorite Alice in Chains songs, start with "At the End of My Daze," the opener on that 1990 record.

Opeth

A stretch on paper, since Opeth come from Swedish progressive death metal, but a natural fit in one specific way. No band leans harder into the heavy-versus-acoustic contrast that Alice in Chains pioneered on Jar of Flies. Opeth build entire albums around the swing between crushing passages and fingerpicked acoustic calm. For the Alice in Chains fan, skip the growled records at first and go straight to Damnation (2003), a quiet, melancholy album with no heavy parts at all. "Windowpane" is the song to open on.

Mastodon

Modern metal owes Alice in Chains more than it usually admits, and Mastodon are often cited as proof. The Atlanta band's progressive sludge is built on thick, detuned riffs and layered harmony vocals, the two Alice in Chains traits that aged best. Crack the Skye (2009) is the most melodic record and the best door in. "Oblivion" shows the harmony side clearly.

The heirs and the adjacent

Days of the New

When Alice in Chains went quiet in the late 90s, Days of the New filled part of the gap. Led by Travis Meeks, the band built an almost entirely acoustic post-grunge sound that reviewers compared directly to Alice in Chains' gentler releases, Sap, Jar of Flies, and the MTV Unplugged set. The 1997 debut, nicknamed the Yellow album, produced "Touch, Peel and Stand," which topped the Mainstream Rock chart. Start there.

Godsmack

Godsmack built a career on the low, brooding end of alternative rock, and Sully Erna's baritone phrasing is openly indebted to Staley. The band even shares a name with "God Smack," a track on Dirt about heroin, though the origin story is muddy: Erna has told a cold-sore joke about it, while bassist Robbie Merrill has said it came straight from the Alice in Chains song. Either way the connection is real in the music. "Whatever," from the 1998 debut, is the place to start.

Deftones

The hard rock and alt-metal band from Sacramento are more textural and dreamy than Alice in Chains, but their heavier songs reach for the same mix of beauty and menace, and the admiration runs both ways: Jerry Cantrell guested on Deftones' 2016 album Gore. "Change (In the House of Flies)," from White Pony (2000), is the clearest starting point.

Staind

Staind took the quiet, confessional side of Alice in Chains, the Jar of Flies ballads, and built a whole sound on it. Aaron Lewis sings with the same heavy-hearted sincerity, and the band's acoustic material in particular reads like a direct descendant. "It's Been Awhile" (2001) is the hit, and the acoustic version of "Outside" shows the lineage even more plainly.

Candlebox

Candlebox get overlooked because their biggest hit was also their most radio-friendly, but the band belongs here. They formed in Seattle in 1990 and broke through on the back of "Far Behind," a slow-burning single off their 1993 debut that pairs a melodic chorus with the kind of heavy, grinding guitar tone Alice in Chains made the city's default. They never got as dark as Dirt, but for the melodic, mid-tempo end of the Seattle sound they are a reliable next step. Start with "Far Behind," then "You."

A few more worth a listen

Beyond the main list, a couple of 90s acts scratch the same itch without a full write-up. Mudhoney and TAD, two more Seattle bands, run grittier and more garage-rooted but belong to the same scene and the same record-store bin. And if you came to Alice in Chains through the doom and sludge in their riffs rather than the grunge label, the heavier reaches of hard rock and the stoner-doom underground will keep rewarding you long after the obvious names run out. The point of a list like this is to turn one band you love into a map, and Alice in Chains sit at a crossroads between grunge, metal, and acoustic songwriting, so the roads out of them run in every direction.

The thread running through all of these is tone. Alice in Chains made heaviness feel like mourning, and the bands worth chasing afterward are the ones that understand weight is an emotion, not just a volume setting. Build a playlist, start with the entry points above, and follow the ones that stick.