As a result, Alice was now marketed as an alternative band, not as a metal outfit, and the group landed a song, the menacing "Would?," on the Singles soundtrack during the summer of 1992. As the band prepared their second album, they released the largely acoustic EP Sap in 1991 to strong reviews.nn Prior to the release of Alice in Chains' second album, Seattle became a media sensation thanks to the surprise success of Nirvana. Alice in Chains supported the album by opening for Van Halen, Poison, and Iggy Pop, and it became a hit, going gold by the end of the year. Early in 1990, the label released the We Die Young EP as a promotional device and the song became a hit on metal radio, setting the stage for the summer release of the group's debut, Facelift. Columbia Records signed the group in 1989 and the label quickly made the band a priority, targeting heavy metal audiences. Cantrell's friends Mike Starr (bass) and Sean Kinney (drums) rounded out the lineup, and the band began playing local Seattle clubs. Staley met Cantrell in 1987 at the Seattle rehearsal warehouse the Music Bank and the two began working together, changing the group's name to Alice in Chains. The group reunited in 2006 with William DuVall taking over as lead vocalist, and released a string of well-received albums, including 2009's gold-selling and Grammy-nominated Black Gives Way to Blue and 2013's The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here.nnStaley formed the initial incarnation of the band while in high school in the mid-'80s, naming the group Alice N Chains. Such tension drove the band toward stardom in their early years, but following Dirt, Alice in Chains suffered from near-crippling internal tensions that kept the band off the road for the remainder of the '90s, and culminated in Staley's accidental death by overdose in 2002. Guitarist Jerry Cantrell always leaned toward the mainstream, while vocalist Layne Staley was fascinated with the seamy underground. While this dichotomy helped the group soar to multi-platinum status with their second album, 1992's Dirt, it also divided them. They were hard enough for metal fans, yet their dark subject matter and punky attack placed them among the front ranks of the Seattle-based grunge bands. Drawing equally from the heavy riffing of post-Van Halen metal and the gloomy strains of post-punk, the band developed a bleak, nihilistic sound that balanced grinding hard rock with subtly textured acoustic numbers. In many ways, Alice in Chains was the definitive heavy metal band of the early '90s.
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