The 1993 album that Kurt Cobain felt numb to: “No emotion from it”
Despite their small discography, the fact that Nirvana have three albums to their name and fans are still unable to reach a consensus over which is their best just goes to show how staggeringly good they were.
A grunge purist will probably tell you that their debut, Bleach, is their high point, given its authenticity and lack of commercial attention. Of course, there are plenty of merits to the album, but when compared to everything that they did afterwards, there’s also an argument to be made that this was simply the blueprint for the greater things they’d go on to do afterwards.
It isn’t just casual fans who will go for Nevermind, seeing as there’s every good reason for someone to pick it out based on its songwriting merits rather than as a result of its overall accessibility. Their second album boasts some of the band’s most enduring hits, such as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Come As You Are’, but even between all of the surprise hits of the record are some furious displays of angst-ridden genius that managed to combine their grunge origins with a distinct pop sensibility.
However, a good portion of fans note that their final album, In Utero, is their finest hour because of how uncompromising it was, how it took everything they’d demonstrated themselves as being good at over the course of the two previous albums and perfected them, and how it somehow managed to not just match the brilliance of Nevermind, but eclipse it.
Frontman Kurt Cobain certainly didn’t agree with this sentiment at first, and was initially dissatisfied with the results that he and the band had produced, and in a 1993 interview with Melody Maker following the album’s release, he divulged that it took a lot for him to recognise that he had made his masterpiece.
“The first time I played it at home, I knew there was something wrong,” Cobain revealed. “The whole first week, I wasn’t really interested in listening to it at all, and that usually doesn’t happen. I got no emotion from it, I was just numb.”
It was his innate desire to perfect everything that eventually drove him to listen to the record obsessively until he’d convinced himself it was of a high enough standard to be released.
“For three weeks we listened to the record every night, trying to figure out what was wrong with it,” he continued. “We talked about it, and we decided that the vocals weren’t loud enough, the bass was inaudible, and you couldn’t hear the lyrics. That was about it. We knew we couldn’t possibly re-record because we knew we’d achieved the sound we wanted.”
Today, In Utero still stands tall as a genuine landmark achievement in rock music and the high point of the band’s career, and it begs the question as to whether they’d have ever been able to surpass it in quality, or if Cobain was simply built different and capable of making even more masterpieces despite his initial ambivalence towards the finished product.
