The "90s fine look" is trending all over TikTok right now. The flannel, the dark denim, the chunky boots, the eyeliner, the general aesthetic of a decade that peaked in its disregard for polish. And I have been watching this content with a very specific internal experience. Not nostalgia exactly, because I wasn't really conscious for most of the 90s. I was born into the tail end of it and my formative awareness happened in the 2000s. But grunge raised me anyway. Through older cousins' CDs. Through the back shelves of the used music store I found in high school. Through the guitar, and what the guitar taught me about what music could do.
So I want to talk about the 90s aesthetic revival, why it makes sense, why it feels different when a new generation wears it versus when the people who lived it wore it, and why every generation ends up stealing the last one's rebellion. That last one is the thing I find most interesting.
What Grunge Actually Was (Not Just the Flannel)
Let me start here because the aesthetic trend and the actual movement are different things and I want to honor the difference before getting into why the aesthetic is having a moment.
Grunge was a specific convergence of circumstance: economically stagnant Pacific Northwest, a generation of young people who felt actively lied to by the optimism of the decade before them, the democratization of cheap recording equipment and small venues that made it possible to make something raw and real without industry gatekeeping. The music was loud because things were loud inside. The flannel was cheap and functional before it was a statement. The distortion pedals weren't aesthetic choices. They were the sound of something that needed more than a clean guitar could produce.
What made it land was authenticity to a specific emotional reality. Not the authenticity of "this person really feels this way right now" but the authenticity of "this music describes something true about what it feels like to be alive in THIS body in THIS time." The anger in it was real. The despair in it was real. The melody you could hold onto underneath the noise, that was the thing. The melody said: I'm still here. I'm still reaching. I'm just not pretending anymore.
I found grunge at sixteen, in a house where despair was not something you expressed out loud, where anger was considered spiritually dangerous, where the complexity of being a young person was always supposed to resolve into faith and obedience. And here was this music that said: no. It's actually this complicated. The noise is real. The mess is real. You don't have to clean it up before you express it.
That was genuinely life-changing for me. Sunday the guitar understood before I did. I learned power chords and played them too loud in my room and it was the first time I ever felt like someone had given me permission to be fully what I was.
The Flannel Inheritance
My relationship with flannel is long and sincere and slightly excessive. I have six flannel shirts. Not as an aesthetic choice but as a textile preference that has persisted through every era of my adult life. Flannel is warm. Flannel is soft after enough washes. Flannel layers. Flannel doesn't care if you gain or lose five pounds. Flannel exists in a state of permanent readiness for whatever the day asks of it.
The flannel I wear now is, and this is the detail I love, partially from thrift stores. Some of it is actually from the 90s. I found a shirt last year at an estate sale that was clearly from that era: the pattern, the cut, the specific weight of the fabric. I bought it for four dollars. It has been worn by at least two people before me. It carries some texture of their lives and I don't know what that is. I just know it fits and it's warm and when I wear it into the studio something about the physicality of it says: this is how we do things. Real material. Real work. No performance.
The flannel trend in the 90s started as anti-fashion. A refusal to participate in the glossy, expensive, image-conscious aesthetic of the decade before. By the late 90s it was fashion. By the 2000s it was a costume. By now it's been through enough cycles that it's simultaneously retro aesthetic, actual functional garment, and signifier of a certain kind of creative sincerity. That layering is interesting. The flannel means something different at each point in its cultural cycle, even though it's the same piece of fabric.
Every Generation Steals the Last One's Rebellion
Here's the thing I've been thinking about as I watch the 90s revival content: the young people wearing the flannel and the platform shoes and the smudged eyeliner right now did not live through the thing the aesthetic came from. They're wearing the residue of a rebellion that preceded them. And I find that not cynical, exactly. Interesting. Maybe even beautiful, in a complicated way.
This is how it always works. The punks of the 70s were revolting against the conformism of the 50s and 60s as they'd inherited it. The 80s took the punk aesthetic and commercialized it. Grunge revolted against the excess of the 80s. The 2000s commodified grunge. Now the 2020s are reaching back past the 2000s and pulling the 90s forward again. Each cycle strips some context and adds some new one. The flannel means something different now than it did when it was first a uniform of not caring about meaning.
I don't think this is theft, exactly. I think it's how culture moves. The generations that follow inherit the aesthetic residue of struggles they didn't have, and sometimes the aesthetic is the door. It's how they find their way back to the music, the ideas, the anger that generated the look in the first place. A kid finds the 90s flannel trend, digs into it, and three months later they've discovered Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney and something in them goes: oh. OH. This is what I've been trying to say. That's not appropriation. That's lineage.
What the 90s Revival Means for Music Right Now
The aesthetic revival always precedes a sonic revival. Fashion runs a few years ahead of music in these cycles. The look comes back first, then people start reaching for the sound that came with it. We're in that gap right now: lots of 90s aesthetic, music still catching up. I find this genuinely exciting from where I sit as an artist who makes things in the grunge-and-alt tradition.
HEATHEN HYMNS has a lot of 90s DNA in it. The guitar tones, the way the distortion builds, the melodic sensibility of wanting to be something you could hold onto underneath the noise. I made no secret of this when I was recording it. The influences are there. And the responses I'm getting from people who've found the album, a meaningful percentage of them are younger than me, people who weren't alive for the original moment but found their way to the aesthetic and then to the music that came with it.
That's the flannel inheritance. That's what it actually means when a trend cycles back. Someone finds the look, follows the thread, arrives at the thing underneath the look, the anger, the honesty, the refusal to sand down the edges so the melody is easier to swallow. That refusal doesn't age. It's the constant. The flannel is just how you recognize the people who feel it.
I have been wearing my thrift-store flannel since high school. I had it before it was a trend. I'll have it after. It was never really about the decade. It was always about what the decade was trying to say underneath the noise. I am still trying to say the same thing. Louder, now, because I know the words better.
The 90s look is fine, yes. Genuinely, objectively fine, the aesthetic holds up. But the reason it keeps coming back is because the thing it pointed at is still true. The messiness. The anger with melody. The refusal to be polished when the truth isn't polished. That's not a decade. That's a posture. And some of us have never really left it.
Welcome back to the flannel. Dig deeper than the surface. That's where the good stuff is.
What I Owe the Music That Found Me
I want to end on something personal rather than theoretical, because that's where it actually lives for me.
I grew up in a house where the music was approved. Where the guitar was allowed only if what you played with it was appropriate. Where the rage and the mess and the complexity of being a teenager who didn't fit her context had to go somewhere quiet and unheard. And then I found this music, loud, imprecise, angry, gorgeous, and it gave all of that somewhere to go. It said: this is real. This counts. You don't have to sand it down.
I owe the music that found me. I owe the women who screamed into microphones in the 90s, the ones who made records in rooms like my closet, with gear like my gear, for people who needed exactly what they were making. That lineage is real. I carry it consciously. Every time I hit record in the cold closet in the cardigan with the fingerless gloves, I am inside a tradition of people who decided that the mess was the message.
HEATHEN HYMNS is my contribution to that tradition. Whether it reaches a hundred people or a hundred thousand, it's my flannel. It's worn-in and slightly frayed and warm in the ways that matter and mine in the ways that cost something. And it might be the thing that some kid somewhere finds in the back of a metaphorical used music store and follows the thread back to everything it connects to.
That's enough. That's the whole point of the music, and the flannel, and the 90s aesthetic revival, and all of it. The good stuff is underneath. Go look.