After that, they went on a 14-year-long hiatus, before reuniting and entering their last phase, their legacy era, which roughly runs from 2010 up to Cornell’s death in 2017. Then came their golden period that ran from 1990 to 1996, when they became global stars on the back of era-defining records like Louder Than Love, Badmotorfinger, Superunknown, and Down on the Upside. This was before they inked a deal with A&M Records, when they were putting out songs on local compilations like Deep Six for C/Z Records, the Screaming Life and Fopp EPs on Sub Pop, and their debut album, Ultramega OK, released by SST. The earliest portion accounts for the band’s indie years that began with their formation in 1984 and ran until about 1989. Soundgarden’s career can be broken down to three distinct phases. “It’s not a bad metaphor if you’re talking about hard rock.” Those fingers, minus drummer Scott Sundquist and bassist Jason Everman, included: Cornell, powerhouse drummer Matt Cameron, intense lead-guitar player Kim Thayil, early bassist and self-described “butt-rocker” Hiro Yamamoto (who left the band to pursue a master’s degree in physics), and Yamamoto’s replacement Ben Shepherd. “One metaphor that either Ben or Chris came up with, I think, was that there are five fingers and we work well as a clenched fist,” Kim Thayil told Spin in 2014. There was simply too much material to work with and they didn’t want to cut things back. It is for that very reason that the band’s albums became progressively longer as the years wore on. Though Chris Cornell, who passed away two years ago, was the front man and penned most of the lyrics - and would find success later on as both a solo artist and the singer in Audioslave - each member wrote songs or added feedback to compositions that other people brought to the studio. They embodied everything that was great about rock, punk, and metal in a single package. They are the critical missing link between Led Zeppelin and Bauhaus, Hüsker Dü and Black Sabbath, Killing Joke and Pink Floyd. Of their contemporaries in the Seattle music scene in the ’80s and ’90s, none was louder, more abrasive, or as heavy, psychedelic, and captivatingly dark and twisted than Soundgarden.

Who sings a thousand years