Twenty-eight. That is the number of studio albums the Melvins had released under their own name when Thunderball came out on Ipecac Recordings on 18 April 2025, and the count goes past thirty once the joint records with other artists are added. Its drummer joined in 1984 and has never left.
Out of that whole shelf, one record outweighs the other twenty-seven stacked together, and it is the first. Recorded in October 1986 at Studio D in Sausalito, California, and pressed on vinyl only by Alchemy Records in 1987, Gluey Porch Treatments took the tempo of a hardcore band, squeezed the speed out of it under the full tonnage of Black Sabbath and left grunge and sludge metal with very little to do except copy the result. The copies sold better. That, in a sentence, is the case for Melvins sludge metal.
The Melvins did not invent slow. They made slow something a punk band could do on purpose, and then everybody else put their own name on it.
A supermarket in Montesano and one side of My War
Formed in early 1983 by three pupils of the same high school in Montesano, Washington, Buzz Osborne on guitar and vocals, Matt Lukin on bass and Mike Dillard on drums, the band took its name from a supervisor at the Thriftway supermarket where Osborne worked as a clerk, a man so unpopular with the staff that his first name struck the three of them as suitably ridiculous. History does not record what Melvin made of it.
The trio started out playing fast hardcore. Then Black Flag slowed down. Released in 1984 by SST Records, the label run by the band's guitarist Greg Ginn, My War put three dirges of six minutes or so on its second side and tore up the one rule American hardcore had agreed on, which was that nothing should ever take this long, and Mudhoney's Steve Turner told the music site Popwell in April 2023 that the record made the Melvins slow down to a crawl. The longer story of where sludge came from runs straight through that side of vinyl.
The drummer who made the crawl possible arrived in 1984. Recruited out of an Iron Maiden cover band to replace Dillard, Dale Crover moved rehearsals into a back room of his parents' house in Aberdeen, and in that room the band set about hammering the two-minute hardcore song flat, playing it slower and heavier than nearly anyone else at the time. Crover is still there. I spent a good part of my twenties telling people in damp basements that a slow band could be more violent than a fast one, and lost every time. The Melvins had already won that argument in a back room.
The record everyone copied
Produced by Mark Deutrom and played by Osborne, Lukin and Crover, Gluey Porch Treatments runs to seventeen tracks in thirty-eight minutes, opening with the six minutes of "Eye Flys" and, five songs later, firing off "Exact Paperbacks", which is finished in forty-three seconds. AllMusic's Ned Raggett heard syllables dragged out at the ends of lines and sinking into murk, and the record is filed among the first sludge metal albums both by AllMusic and by Daniel Bukszpan's The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal.
Think of the hydraulic press at the back of a scrapyard, the one that takes a whole family estate car, doors, bonnet, roof rack and the dog blanket on the back seat, and folds it into a cube small enough to stack on a lorry with forty others. Nothing is thrown away. Every part of the car is still in there, only at a density no road was built to carry. That is what this record did to hardcore: the shouting, the chord changes and the bursts of speed are all still present on "Heavyness of the Load", crushed under several tons of Sabbath until the song comes out square, heavy enough to break a foot and far too dense to drive anywhere.
Everyone in sludge owns a copy of Gluey Porch Treatments. Almost nobody owns the patience it took to make, and that is the one part of the record that cannot be copied.
Ilse Brandt
Then the copying began, and the first copyists lived up the road. Kurt Cobain said in an early Nirvana interview that the band's biggest fear was being taken for a Melvins rip-off, as Charles R. Cross records in his 2001 biography Heavier Than Heaven. In New Orleans, Jimmy Bower of Eyehategod told Decibel in 2011 that he and Kirk Windstein of Crowbar had been getting into the Melvins at the same time. Two of the heaviest bands of the nineties, built out of the same flattened car.
When Osborne and Crover moved to San Francisco in 1988, Lukin stayed behind and formed Mudhoney, and Lori "Lorax" Black took over the bass. Released on Boner Records on 28 January 1991 and produced by Jonathan Burnside, Bullhead stretched the songs past anything the band had put on tape before, opening on the eight and a half minutes of "Boris", a riff that moves like a lift stuck in a multi-storey car park, lurching down one floor, stopping to think about it and lurching again. Rolling Stone placed it at number 60 among the 100 greatest metal albums of all time in 2017, calling it the record that announced the Melvins as a metal band. The family tree back to Sabbath is traced in the introduction.
Aberdeen, Nirvana and a major label
The Nirvana connection is short and needs no decoration. Osborne introduced Cobain, a teenager from Aberdeen, to punk rock, and Cobain drove the Melvins' van and carried their equipment. Crover played drums on Nirvana's demo session of 23 January 1988, and three songs from it ended up on Bleach. After Nevermind sold in the millions, Cobain urged Atlantic Records to sign the Melvins, and the label's president Danny Goldberg did.
Released on 21 September 1993, Houdini reached number 29 on Billboard's Heatseekers chart, the list for acts that have never been in the top 100 of the main US album chart, and had sold around 110,000 copies by 2010, according to The Washington Post. "Honey Bucket" went out as a single with a video. Cobain holds a co-production credit on six tracks and plays guitar on "Sky Pup", but Osborne has said the band dismissed him from the sessions after repeated absences, and that he and Crover played most of the bass themselves whatever the sleeve says.
The Melvins opened for Nirvana on the Italian, Slovenian and German dates of the In Utero tour in February 1994, including what turned out to be Nirvana's last concert, at Terminal Eins in Munich on 1 March. Cobain died on or around 5 April 1994, at the age of 27.
Recorded in nineteen days at A&M Studios in Hollywood with the producer Garth "GGGarth" Richardson, Stoner Witch came out on 18 October 1994 with Mark Deutrom on bass. "Queen" and "Revolve" went out as singles, and the title came from a nickname Crover and his friends had for the stoner girls at their high school. Robert Christgau gave it a C in The Village Voice in November 1994, grumbling that the Melvins were always slow and always ugly, which is a bit like complaining that the press is always heavy. Atlantic put out Stag in 1996 and dropped the band in 1997.
Ipecac, two drummers and a record every spring
Mike Patton's label took over after that. Founded in 1999 by the Faith No More singer and Greg Werckman, Ipecac Recordings began reissuing the Melvins' back catalogue that year and released three new albums in nine months: The Maggot in May 1999, The Bootlicker in August and The Crybaby in February 2000. On a major label that is roughly a decade of product.
In early 2006 the bass-and-drums duo Big Business, Jared Warren and Coady Willis, joined as a pair, and the Melvins became a band with two drummers. Willis is left-handed, so the two drummers fused their kits into a mirror image and shared the big toms in the middle, which is the sound of two men demolishing the same garden shed from opposite ends and meeting at the door. (A) Senile Animal followed on 10 October 2006, and The Bride Screamed Murder, on 1 June 2010, put the Melvins on the Billboard 200, the main US album chart, for the first time in the band's history.
The later years read like a band that treats a year without a new album as a clerical error. Working with God, in February 2021, was the second album by the 1983 line-up, with Mike Dillard back on drums. Tarantula Heart arrived in April 2024, Thunderball, the third album by the 1983 line-up, in April 2025, and Savage Imperial Death March, made with Napalm Death and first sold as a limited vinyl pressing in February 2025, got its wide release on Ipecac on 10 April 2026.
| Year | Record | Label | Line-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 | Gluey Porch Treatments | Alchemy | Osborne, Lukin, Crover |
| 1991 | Bullhead | Boner | Osborne, Lori Black, Crover |
| 1993 | Houdini | Atlantic | Osborne and Crover, Cobain credited |
| 2006 | (A) Senile Animal | Ipecac | Osborne, Crover, Warren, Willis |
| 2026 | Savage Imperial Death March | Ipecac | Melvins with Napalm Death |
Why the cube still wins
The copying never stopped. Brann Dailor of Mastodon put Houdini on his list of formative records for The Skinny, which is where anyone wondering is Mastodon Sludge Metal ought to start. Grunge took the weight and added choruses. Sludge took the weight and added a grudge.
The original is still at the back of the scrapyard, forty years on, a hardcore band pressed into a cube that nobody has managed to unfold.
