The Greatest Pearl Jam Album of All Time

2025-05-26

Pearl Jam

In honor of the legacy of Pearl Jam, Audio Ink Radio presents its choice for the greatest Pearl Jam album of all time. – Author: Anne Erickson, Photo via Danny Clinch

When it comes to the greatest grunge rock bands of all time, Pearl Jam is absolutely up there. Sure, Nirvana is the grunge band who is credited with really delivering the movement to the masses and making it go mainstream, but Nirvana was just one of many grunge bands active in the Seattle area in the late-1980s and early-1990s who were making noise.

Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Tad, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Green River and Skin Yard were all bands in the so-called grunge scene that were instrumental to the genre’s formation. But, the biggest were really Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.

Pearl Jam has a longer discography than most of their contemporary grunge bands, mainly because their lead vocalist, Eddie Vedder, is still alive. Sadly, Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains have all lost their original singers. In honor of the legacy of Vedder and company, Audio Ink Radio presents its choice for the greatest Pearl Jam album of all time.

The Best Pearl Jam Album Ever

Pearl Jam’s discography consists of 12 studio albums, 23 live albums, three compilation albums and 46 singles, but for the purpose of this article, we’re only going with the band’s best studio album. That was enough of a challenge, since each of the band’s albums carries its own importance.

We’re going with the album that most consider Pearl Jam’s best and one of the most crucial albums to the development of grunge music. That album is “Ten.” Honestly, could we have gone with any other album?

Pearl Jam released “Ten” on August 27, 1991, a few weeks before Nirvana released “Nevermind.” The album featured the musicians Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, Walter Gray, Dave Krusen, Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, Tim Palmer and Rick Parashar, according to the band’s website.

What’s wild is that when “Ten” first came out, really, nobody paid that much attention to it. Why? Well, grunge hadn’t hit the mainstream yet. A month later, when “Nevermind” and the Nirvana single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out, that really gave life to the entire movement, and people started to discover other grunge bands.

It took about a year for “Ten” to really go up the charts. As Billboard notes, a year after its release, “Ten” reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart. The hard-rocking single “Jeremy” finally became a massive hit in the summer of 1992.

In Rolling Stone’s review of “Ten” back in 1991, the outlet describes Pearl Jam as descending from Mother Love Bone “at warp speed” They describes his voice as “a ragged, enraged mongrel blend of Robert Plant and James Hetfield,” which is interesting, because after Pearl Jam became big, Vedder wasn’t really compared to any other vocalist. He really has a sound all his own. Rolling Stone also described the band as wringing “a lot of drama out of a few declarative power chords swimming in echo.” Rolling Stone also named “Ten” the No. 160 best album of all time, for any genre.

Pearl Jam documented their fascinating beginnings and what led up to the release of “Ten” in a 2011 documentary, “Pearl Jam Twenty,” directed by Cameron Crowe. It’s certainly worth a watch, for any good grunge fan. The documentary not only goes into the history of Pearl Jam, from Mother Love Bone to their later years, but it offers an lengthy history of the Seattle rock movement.

Find Audio Ink Radio’s in-depth interview with Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam in this feature.

Anne Erickson
Latest posts by Anne Erickson (see all)
Posted by Anne Erickson | Features, Grunge, Music

Related Posts