@Alvaro Duarte

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After a decade of hair bands singing about wild times and fast living, hard rock in the ’90s turned darker, heavier and meaner. This can be credited to the commercial success of a wave of bands emerging from outside the mainstream. Metallica’s bulldozing arena anthems reflect their thrash-metal roots, Nirvana’s grunge revolution delivered the angst of underground rock to MTV, Rage Against the Machine’s politically charged attacks reflected their days in the hardcore scene and Tool’s harsh nihilism grew out of the fringes of alt-metal. Outside of Guns N’ Roses, who managed to score some awfully big hits early in the decade, few veteran pop-metal acts survived these seismic shifts. It wouldn’t be until the tail end of the ’90s that a brash young MC from Detroit calling himself Kid Rock would help revive high-volume party music with his infectious mix of swaggering rock riffs and megaton hip-hop beats.

If you’re after just the hits, this is where you’ll find them: a handpicked selection of hard rock's biggest songs of the past few years. Our editors update this playlist regularly, so if you hear something you like, add it to your library.

A good cover not only tells you something about its source material—it’s also strong enough to stand on its own. Maybe you know the originals here, maybe not—that’s not the point. The point is to tap into a tradition of metal, punk, and hard-rock bands joyfully ripping through other people’s songs that conjure the garages, basements, and holes-in-the-wall where rock was born. Because, really, what wouldn’t sound better faster and louder? Our editors swap out these picks regularly, so if you hear something you like, add it to your library.

The commercial resiliency of alt-metal and post-grunge really is astonishing. After all, many of the biggest hits of the 2010s came from veteran hard rockers (Disturbed, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin) rooted in these ’90s subgenres. Exceptions emerged, of course. While Greta Van Fleet’s Led Zeppelin-inspired rave-ups and Ghost’s doom-metal nightmares may seem, at first blush, radically different from each other, the success of both reflected the growing number of young acts revisiting ’70s metal. Even Denmark’s Volbeat, around since the mid-2000s, finally broke in the United States thanks largely to their classic metal riffs. The mainstreaming of metalcore and hardcore also warrants mentioning: Bring Me the Horizon and A Day to Remember gradually attained stardom thanks to their knack for mixing furious breakdowns with sparkling pop productions. It represented a genuinely fresh twist and perhaps a sign of future developments for hard rock.

Alice Cooper (the band and later the man) was a rock trailblazer. His flair for macabre subject matter and elaborate stage shows brought elements of vaudeville and the Grand Guignol Theatre to '70s popular music. It also made Alice Cooper massively successful, influential force in music. Cooper's impact can be clearly seen in '80s multi-platinum Sunset Strip bands like Mötley Crüe and Guns N' Roses, punk icons like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, and underground acts like Sonic Youth or Laughing Hyenas. Here's the best of artists influenced by Alice Cooper.