Alice in Chains Albums Ranked in Order of Awesomeness
Alice in Chains have never been exactly who everyone thought they were. That's not to say they weren't awesome the entire time – in one way or another, excluding perhaps their mid-'80s dalliance with glam. (They went by "Alice N Chains" and looked like this.)
But frontman Layne Staley, guitarist-singer-songwriter Jerry Cantrell, drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Inez and the late Mike Starr were already an established metal band with a Grammy-nominated album out by the time Nevermind dropped. They were never a grunge band in the Sub Pop sense of the word, but they came to define a metallic edge to the genre – one that Staley cut with seething charisma and an incantation-like drone that would burst into searing confessionals about heroin. When he died in 2002, it was a tremendous loss, but not without warning – Alice in Chains hadn't recorded together in seven years.
Around 2005, Cantrell reassembled the remaining members and later enlisted Comes With the Fall singer William DuVall to take Staley's role, and they've continued on as a recording and touring entity.
Normally when we rank albums in order of awesomeness, we only take into account official full-length studio albums. But Alice in Chains only have five and they happened to release a couple of EPs and a live record that are incredibly significant. So we'll just consider them all albums. Check out the list below.