Grief's sludgy doom metal brought extremely slow riffs to the metal underground. The band was heavily influenced by Black Sabbath and doom warriors Saint Vitus. Grief's music was jagged, noisy, harsh and brutally dissonant. Lead singer Jeff Hayward favored the sort of tortured, throat-shredding, screaming vocals that were quite common in death metal/black metal and grindcore, and that risk-taking combination of grindcore-like vocals and slow, Sabbath-influenced riffs made Grief one of the more interesting alternative metal bands to emerge in the early ‘90s.