5 Rock Songs From The '90s That Nail The Feeling Of True Angst

Angst peaks in the teenage years — there's nothing like puberty to really ruin your mood for a few years — but like acne, that adolescent scourge never totally goes away. When you're tired, or stressed, or just struggling with an attack of everyday ennui: BAM. Angst can strike. And though angst is a truly anytime emotion, it had its musical heyday in the 1990s. With the Soviet Union off the table and 9/11 and its resultant challenges off in the future, the cultures of the United States and Europe had most of the decade free to really stay in their own heads and dwell on personal problems, leading to a deeply angsty decade for popular music. 

Angst is a fundamentally inward-looking emotion: It may be inspired by heartbreak, various modern horrors, or even a rainy day, but ultimately angst concerns one's own reaction. Angst is also performative: An angsty person flounces, sulks, sighs, does anything except suffer in silence. It's also a little embarrassing once you feel better, the emotional equivalent of eating the whole container of ice cream and leaving the carton to dry on the coffee table. With these factors in mind, we've chosen five of the most poor-me tracks of the 1990s, based mostly on their whinetacular lyrics, to remind you of how bad we used to think we had it.

The dudes from Nirvana were cute by scruffy Clinton-era standards, talented, and got rich in their 20s, so of course they were miserable. "Smells Like Teen Spirit," probably their best-known song, is of course a contender for the inevitable "Nirvana spot" on a list of angsty tunes, but for our money, "Heart-Shaped Box," the first single from 1993's grunge-defining album "In Utero," is even closer to the musical equivalent of throwing yourself bonelessly onto the couch so someone will ask you what's wrong.

Nirvana's lyrics are never wholly straightforward, but those for "Heart-Shaped Box" present some of the bands bleakest, most compelling imagery: "I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks / I've been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap..." Theoretically it's about a bad relationship, but these feelings of being restrained, of having narrow options, of simply not having the gumption to get up and start making changes, could apply to any number of situations — and are central to the '90s angst experience. (That said, you're on your own trying to interpret the next verse's line "Meat-eating orchids forgive no one just yet.")

The video for Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" was one of a handful that could permanently alter a casual MTV viewer's brain chemistry if they weren't careful. If you even saw 30 seconds of it, you remember it: The subdivision populated with various figures, nearly frozen in place, with impossibly wide, artificial smiles was as cool as it was creepy, a direct hit on the admittedly easy target of bland suburbia.

The track's music is surprisingly chill for such a creepy video, with an almost lounge-cover feel that lets it stand out from the rest of the era's radio tracks without feeling like a radical departure. The lyrics are, ah, not chill: "Times are gone / For honest men / Sometimes, far too long for snakes..." The whole song feels like a lament for the state of the world, suffused with an eerily calm despair. 

But as justified as a gripe about "how things are" may be — "You adults get off my lawn!" — "Black Hole Sun" clocks in at a bloated 5:20 runtime. Going on too long about your feelings? That's angst, baby!

To its credit, '90s alternative band Garbage knows that a lot of its work is angsty, and the self-aware but still sulky "Only Happy When It Rains" centers the self-deprecation that runs through some of the world's angstiest work. Thanks to Shirley Manson's powerful but edged delivery, lyrics like "Pour your misery down on me" and "I only smile in the dark" hit with the desired double-tap: She's only happy when it rains, and she's making fun of herself for only being happy when it rains.

Despite the track's thorough gloom, Garbage once performed "Only Happy When It Rains" at a major national celebration: the opening of the revived Scottish Parliament in 1999. Edinburgh-born Manson reportedly cranked up her Scots accent as she sang and bantered with the crowd, prefacing "Only Happy When It Rains" with the comment that, ultimately, the song was "a comment on the Scottish national psyche," according to The Guardian. No report on the emotional toll performing the rainy-day song in a rainy-day country had on Manson's American bandmates.

A sign of maturity is the ability to be embarrassed by your past self, and a lot of people who played the Smashing Pumpkins' album "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" on loop as teenagers now writhe in their seats when they remember it. "Infinite sadness" seems a bit extreme now that millennials have had access to therapy for a few decades, but in its day this album was the gospel of a certain type of performatively distraught teen. You could pick nearly any song from "Mellon Collie" as an angst classic, but our choice is "Bodies."

The chorus is just the phrase "Love is suicide" repeated, which is evidence enough, but the verses are just as gloomy. Billy Corgan's nasal rage-bray delivers lyrics like "All my blisters now revealed / In the darkness of my dreams" with an apparent straight face, all delivered over driving, noisy instrumental parts. The song almost feels incomplete without the accompaniment of someone yelling, "God, Mom, get out of my room!"

No one tell Alanis Morissette, but it's actually considered good luck if it rains on your wedding day. Bless the Canadian songbird's little heart, she didn't let that stop her from including drizzly nuptials in "Ironic," her cri de coeur about bad luck and the gods' mean-spirited hijinks. For context, rain on your wedding day shares space with an unjust execution and a plane crash, as well as a bug in your wine, in Morissette's litany of this-sucks outcomes. She may lack a sense of proportion, but at least she's going for completeness. Delivered with Morissette's natural whine, "Ironic" is the national anthem of glass-half-empty loyalists everywhere.

"Ironic" gets bonus points for its roommates on Morissette's smash album "Jagged Little Pill" (which was not, as many believe, Morissette's first album).  "You Oughta Know," a spurned-woman anthem that has lit up post-breakup karaoke outings for decades now, and "Perfect," sung from the point of view of an abusive parent, complete a hat-trick of angsterrific jams.