The grunge pioneers succumbed to in-fighting and creative differences in 1997, having blasted out a 13-year career that helped put alternative rock on the mainstream radar.

To salute their return to our shores and active duty, here are the five albums that put them on the map.

Ultramega OK (1988)

FORMING in Seattle in 1984 with Chris Cornell on vocals and drums, Kim Thayil on guitar and Hiro Yamamoto on bass, the band had recruited another drummer (Scott Sundquist) by the following year to allow Cornell to get out front and focus on his remarkable four-octave-plus-range and add an extra guitar to back Thayil's insane shredding. Their first recordings appeared on 1986's now-legendary Deep Six compilation - an early grunge document that showed off Soundgarden's heavy sounds alongside Pearl Jam precursor Green River and Seattle stalwarts Melvins. This led to a signing with eventually influential Seattle label Sub Pop - their Hunted Down/Nothing To Say single was the first released by the label - and two EPs (Screaming Life and Fopp) before they switched to larger indie SST Records (home to the likes of Black Flag, Minutemen and Husker Du) to make their debut album. With new drummer Matt Cameron on board, they followed SST's suggestion and recorded with non-Seattle producer Drew Canulette - something the band would come to regret as Canulette had no idea about the emerging sound coming from America's north-west, according to the band. "This producer... really did affect our album in a kind of negative way," Cornell recalled to Kerrang!. "It should have been one of the best records we ever did." Having said that, Ultramega OK stands up as a fine example of the musical seeds that eventually blossom for Soundgarden (albeit with a warped sense of humour that eventually disappeared). It's a mixture of Led Zeppelin's heavy blues (Howling Wolf cover Smokestack Lightning, Incessant Mace), Black Sabbath's riffing and wailing (awesome Tool-like opener Flower), splashes of punk energy (All Your Lies, Head Injury), occasionally complex timings and rhythms (Circle Of Power, He Didn't), and that voice, best employed by Cornell on Smokestack Lightning and Beyond The Wheel, the latter of which shows off almost his entire range. Ultramega OK failed to chart but lone single Flower did score MTV airplay, making them one of the first of the "Seattle Sound" bands to do so. It led to a European tour, a Grammy nomination and interest from even bigger labels.

Here they are doing Beyond The Wheel in Germany in 1990 - how Cornell hits those notes from 2:15 onwards, I'll never know:

Louder Than Love (1989)

SOUNDGARDEN signed with major label A&M Records, earning the scorn of the notoriously fickle Seattle scene. Supporting Guns N' Roses - seen as the antithesis of what alt-rock stood for - didn't help, but they set about proving people wrong with their second album Louder Than Love, which would be their first to crack the Billboard 200 and yield their first singles to reach the UK top 100. Slicker, more concentrated, more serious and more consistently heavier than Ultramega OK, Louder Than Love took its predecesser's ideas and focused them into a sharper representation of their sound. Outside the singles - the effective single riffer Hands All Over and the grinding Loud Love - the band pitches its style across a complex range of variations. At one end is the slow groove Dazed-And-Confused-style stoner rock of Power Trip and at the other is the pacy punk-metal of Full On Kevin's Mom, and in the middle lies the gradual speed-up of Gun. Meanwhile, Hands All Over is perhaps the most straightforward Soundgarden song ever, while I Awake covers more timings than most bands try out in their career. The band was starting to take their music more serious (with the exception of Full On Kevin's Mom and it's jokey reprise, and the oft-missed irony of Big Dumb Sex) and so did their fans, who either came crawling back with their tails between their legs or came in fresh, drawn in by the dark metal-tinged riffs and Cornell's gravity-defying voice. It sold a respectable 160,000 copies in the US and garnered more attention for the band.

From the same concert, here's the uber-sludgey Gun:

Badmotorfinger (1991)

THE timing couldn't have been better for Soundgarden to release their third album - the grunge wave was slowly forcing its way into the mainstream on the back of Nirvana's Nevermind and Pearl Jam's Ten in the months prior to Badmotorfinger's launch. While those two bands helped draw attention to their Seattle compatriots, they also inadvertantly overwhelmed their heavier neighbours. Badmotorfinger would peak in the Billboard top 40 and eventually sell more than 1.5 million copies, but that was a pittance compared to what Nevermind and Ten (or even the following year's Dirt by Alice In Chains) shifted, leading the first grunge band signed to a major to be regarded as underachievers. Still, it was Soundgarden's best showing - and best album to date - driven by their first truly excellent singles. With a greater focus on songwriting from Cornell and the arrival of new bassist Ben Shepherd, the band entered a golden period of collaboration that brought about some of their best work. The detuned lightning and thunderous breakdown of Rusty Cage was merged with Cornell's best melody to date, helping make it one of three top 50 UK singles on the record (it would also get a new lease of life five years later when Johnny Cash covered it and revived his career). Jesus Christ Pose similarly mashed killer metal riffs with Cornell's increasingly hooky vocal lines, while fellow single Outshined was equally effective and Searching With My Good Eye Closed had them sounding stadium-ready. The mammoth Sabbath-esque slow grooves and the punkish fury remained (on Slaves & Bulldozers and Face Pollution respectively) as did the weirdly timed flourishes, but Badmotorfinger is a step forward thanks to the band's ability to work those mainstays of their career into catchier, more fully realised songs. The record would earn them their second Grammy nomination and is viewed as one of the most important albums of the '90s. But the best was yet to come.

A '90s classic:

Superunknown (1994)

GRUNGE was seemingly on the way out when Soundgarden got around to their fourth album - Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was in the throws of heroin addiction and would take his own life in April, Alice In Chains were becoming increasingly hobbled by Layne Staley's drug problems, and Pearl Jam were getting increasingly artier and less grungey while embroiled in an unwinnable legal battle with Ticketmaster. But that was when Soundgarden managed to unleash their masterpiece, a 16-song epic that boasted five stunning singles, all with riffs and progressions so good that initially you didn't notice how bent the timings and structures were. Cornell's howls still rang strong and were even more front-and-centre now that they were accompanied by even better lyrics - a series of cryptic yet engaging tone poems that dealt with the rock touchstones of drug abuse, depression, insanity and mortality. Michael Beinhorn's production brought new clarity to their sound while buffering off some of the metallic edges as the band found new inspiration in pop, psychedelia and world music. The galloping Spoonman, the stomping My Wave, the brooding Fell On Black Days, the dark Beatles-inspired mega-hit Black Hole Sun, the perky descent of The Day I Tried To Live, the full throttle psych-rock of the title track and the dark trip of Head Down help make this a stunningly varied journey that takes their "Led Sabbath" past and spins it in new directions. Superunknown topped charts and critic's end-of-year polls while selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. It is rightly regarded as a '90s classic.

Here's a live TV performance of Spoonman towards the end of their career:

Down On The Upside (1996)

COMPARED to Superunknown, Down On The Upside is seen as a failure - a let-down follow-up that tries too hard to seek out new territory. While it has its share of filler, Soundgarden's final album still topped charts, got good reviews, sold a few million copies and is something of an under-rated gem that boasts some of their most creative moments and greatest songs. It's top five songs might not match the five singles of Superunknown, but it's a strong successor that showcases both past strengths and future expansions in their sound. By producing the album themselves, they inadvertantly exacerbated frictions within in the band, such as Thayil's desire to stick to the heavy riffing of their past and Cornell wish to do the opposite. With Shepherd and Cornell writing the bulk of the record, Thayil lost out, making for a less metal album but one that manages to pack punches in new ways. The obvious stand-outs are the three Cornell-penned pop-infused dark-rock singles Blow Up The Outside World, Pretty Noose, and Burden In My Hand, the latter of which was the most requested on Triple J for seemingly months on end in '96. But outside these three more straight-ahead Soundgarden songs (which proved to be elaborate on closer inspection) there were still typically harder-edged songs that nailed those early touchstones - the flat-out punk bursts of Ty Cobb and No Attention, the heavy and twisted Never The Machine Forever, the Zeppelinesque Tighter & Tighter. Less than a year after releasing Down On The Upside, having become fed up with touring, the rock industry machine and struggling to keep the infighting to a respectable level, the band called it day.

This might be controversial, but this is possibly my favourite Soundgarden song that's not Spoonman: