Afghan Whigs/The Twilight Singers

The Afghan Whigs were early arrivals on the grunge scene — in fact, the edgy Ohioans were one of the first bands signed to Sub Pop from outside the rainy climes of the Northwest — but they evolved far beyond their gritty beginnings. The heat generated by Greg Dulli’s lupine howl and Rick McCollum’s grinding guitar on early tracks like “Turn on the Water” must have come in handy on cold Midwestern nights. On breakout album Gentlemen’s hit single “Debonair,” the Whigs honed their attack to a snarling, saber-toothed bite. And the undercurrent of soul running through their sound turned into a rising tide on a wounded, roaring reinvention of Freda Payne’s 1970 R&B smash “Band of Gold.”

Greg Dulli leaps from his home base to twilight tones and gutter grooves, in Next Steps.

In their time together, the Afghan Whigs grew in several directions at once. “What Jail Is Like” introduces elegant piano lines into the Whigs’ world of scrappy, slashing guitars, and “Blame, Etc.” gives you an idea of what the Shaft soundtrack might sound like if it had been recorded by alt-rock renegades. After the band called it a day, feral frontman Greg Dulli expanded his horizons even further with the Twilight Singers, tying trip-hop grooves to swelling, soulful strands of melody on “Twilight.” His restless muse also led him to team up with fellow grunge survivor/former Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan as the Gutter Twins, whose brooding brotherhood birthed the throbbing, hypnotic “God’s Children.”

Move from moody Motown to psych-folk sojourns in Deep Cuts.

Whether with the Afghan Whigs, Twilight Singers, or Gutter Twins, Greg Dulli has soaked up the influence of everything from Motown to psychedelia. The Whigs worked their way into one of power-pop heroes Big Star’s most moving tunes, giving equal attention to both the darkness and the dreaminess of “Nightime.” They amped up the drama and desperation — not to mention the guitars — of the Supremes’ smash “My World Is Empty Without You,” and turned their Cincinnati pals the Ass Ponys’ delirious, disturbing “Mr. Superlove” from an edgy lo-fi lope into creepy front-porch folk-rock. Even on his own, Dulli manages to update original freak-folkie Skip Spence’s 1969 “Dixie Peach Promenade” without losing an ounce of its off-kilter charm.

As the voice behind the Afghan Whigs and the Twilight Singers, Greg Dulli has spent more than two decades putting the sin in sinister with his alt-rock noir. Throughout these projects, he’s wandered a world where love and longing share space with sin and shame. Sometimes Dulli’s dark-night-of-the-soul narratives are framed by the garage-bred riffs of Midwestern marauders the Afghan Whigs, other times by the subtler shadings of the Twilight Singers — and that says nothing of his occasional solo sojourns and side projects, like the Gutter Twins. But from the grungy to the groove-heavy, from the manic to the moody, we’ve captured all the key moments of the journey for you right here.