Screaming Trees: An Underrated Essential
A guide to Screaming Trees, the underrated grunge band from Ellensburg whose psychedelic edge and Mark Lanegan's voice made them essential listening.
Screaming Trees are the great underrated band of grunge, the one whose name belongs next to Soundgarden and Mudhoney but rarely gets there. Formed in the small town of Ellensburg, Washington, they brought a psychedelic, garage-rock streak to the Seattle sound, and in Mark Lanegan they had one of the finest voices the genre ever produced. They never quite broke big, and that’s exactly why they’re worth your time.
A band from the wrong side of the mountains
Screaming Trees didn’t come from Seattle at all. They formed in 1985 in Ellensburg, a farming town a couple of hours east, where brothers Gary Lee Conner and Van Conner ran a video store and played in a band with drummer Mark Pickerel and singer Mark Lanegan. That geographic distance gave them a different flavor from their big-city peers.
Where much of the early scene leaned on punk and metal, Screaming Trees leaned on 1960s psychedelia and garage rock. The Conner brothers loved swirling, melodic riffs, and Lanegan’s deep, weathered baritone gave the whole thing a haunted, soulful gravity. They were a grunge band, but a strange and lyrical one. Their story is a key thread in the wider Seattle music scene.
The band’s look added to the sense of an odd fit. The Conner brothers were physically imposing, far from the lithe rock-star template, and there was something defiantly unglamorous about a group of small-town outsiders making lush, psychedelic music. They didn’t dress the part, didn’t court the press well, and never seemed entirely comfortable with the machinery of fame. In a scene that prized authenticity, Screaming Trees were almost too authentic for their own commercial good.
The early years and SST
The band’s first records came out on SST, the influential California label run by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn. Albums like Even If and Especially When (1987) and Buzz Factory (1989) built a devoted underground following and showed a band already fully formed, all fuzzy hooks and Lanegan’s mournful delivery.
These records are dense, colorful, and a little chaotic, reflecting the volatile chemistry inside the band. The Conner brothers and Lanegan fought famously and often, on stage and off, and that tension fed the music. You can trace the full discography on Discogs, and AllMusic treats the SST era as a cult treasure worth excavating.
The SST years also place Screaming Trees in important company. The label, founded by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, was home to a generation of fiercely independent American underground bands, from Hüsker Dü to Sonic Youth to the Minutemen. Coming up in that environment shaped the band’s instincts: they learned to tour cheaply, record fast, and trust their own weird vision over anyone’s idea of a hit. By the time the major labels came knocking, Screaming Trees had already spent years building a sound nobody else had, which is exactly why it survived the transition intact.
After signing to Epic, the band released Uncle Anesthesia in 1991, co-produced by Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and Terry Date. It was a transitional record, heavier and more polished than the SST albums, and it set the stage for the breakthrough that followed. The grunge wave was just beginning to crest, and for once Screaming Trees seemed perfectly positioned to ride it.
Sweet Oblivion and the big moment
Screaming Trees signed to Epic and, in 1992, released Sweet Oblivion, the album that should have made them stars. It arrived right as grunge went global, and its lead single “Nearly Lost You” landed on the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s film Singles, getting heavy MTV play.
Sweet Oblivion is the band’s masterpiece: tighter than the SST records, with Barrett Martin now on drums and the songwriting at its peak. “Dollar Bill,” “Shadow of the Season,” and the title track are among the genre’s finest moments, and Lanegan’s voice has never sounded better. Rolling Stone and Pitchfork have both since recognized the record as an overlooked classic. Yet despite the buzz, the album stalled commercially, and the band’s internal chaos kept them from capitalizing.
The frustrating thing is how close they came. “Nearly Lost You” got real exposure, the Singles soundtrack put them in front of a huge audience, and the songs were undeniably strong. But a band needs momentum to convert a moment into a career, and Screaming Trees never had the internal stability to sustain it. Tours collapsed into infighting, and the long gaps between records let the audience drift. They had the songs to be as big as their peers and never the machinery to make it happen.
Dust and the long goodbye
After years of delays and turmoil, Screaming Trees returned in 1996 with Dust, an ambitious, richly produced album that many fans consider their best. Songs like “All I Know” and “Sworn and Broken” added strings, sitar, and a widescreen sweep to their psychedelic foundation. It was a creative triumph that, frustratingly, arrived just as the grunge wave was receding.
The band toured into the late 1990s but never released another studio album, officially disbanding in 2000. The reasons are familiar to anyone who follows these stories:
- Relentless internal conflict between Lanegan and the Conner brothers
- Bad timing, with their best work landing as the genre cooled
- Lanegan’s growing solo career pulling his focus elsewhere
- A label relationship that never delivered the push they needed
Why Screaming Trees still matter
Screaming Trees are essential precisely because they were never a clean fit. They added a psychedelic, melodic dimension that most of their peers lacked, and Lanegan’s post-Trees career, including acclaimed solo records and his work with Queens of the Stone Age, only deepened his legend until his death in 2022.
For listeners, the catalog is a reward waiting to be found. Here’s a quick map for newcomers:
| Album | Year | Why to start here |
|---|---|---|
| Buzz Factory | 1989 | The wild, fuzzy peak of the SST years |
| Sweet Oblivion | 1992 | Their breakthrough; start with “Nearly Lost You” |
| Dust | 1996 | Lush, ambitious, and arguably their finest hour |
They belong in any serious conversation about underrated grunge bands, and discovering them is one of the genre’s real pleasures. Once their catalog opens up, it’s hard not to wonder how a band this good slipped through the cracks while lesser acts went platinum.
The bottom line
Screaming Trees never got the fame they earned, and maybe that’s fitting for a band that always sat slightly outside the scene’s center. But the music is the thing, and the music is extraordinary: psychedelic, soulful, and carried by one of rock’s great voices. They are the band you graduate to once the big names start to feel familiar, the discovery that makes you realize how much deeper the genre runs than its greatest hits.
Start with Sweet Oblivion, then dig backward into the SST records and forward into Dust. Follow Mark Lanegan’s solo work after that, and you’ll find a whole second career as rich as the first. To understand the world that produced them, read our piece on the Seattle music scene, and to find more bands like them, our guide to underrated grunge bands is the next stop.