The album Chris Cornell said reinvented Soundgarden: “We’re expanding on it”
Most bands are lucky to achieve half of the milestones that Soundgarden was able to accomplish. Although they were relatively late-bloomers to the commercial side of grunge, they were the first to be tapped as mainstream stars when it started blowing up, thanks to Chris Cornell’s massive voice. Cornell admitted that he had love for all of their albums, but he revealed that Superunknown was the moment when everything started to really change for them.
If you look at where the band were just a few months before the album’s release, they seemed to have honed their sound down to a science on Badmotorfinger. After fiddling around with records that sounded like a strange mix between metal and punk, this was when everything started shifting to a heavier version of Led Zeppelin, complete with time signature changes and Cornell’s impressive shriek.
Then again, releasing the album on the same day Nirvana dropped their nuclear atom bomb, Nevermind, probably didn’t do them any favours. Songs like ‘Rusty Cage’ may have been great for what they were, but were any of the others on the record going to hold a candle to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?
In fact, there are a few moments on the project where the band seemed to be bidding farewell to their earlier sound, almost like they were outgrowing the grunge label they had been associated with. After Kurt Cobain’s death took the wind out of the movement, Superunknown unintentionally made them one of the biggest stars in the world.
Off the strength of ‘Black Hole Sun’ and ‘Spoonman’, Soundgarden finally had the record that would bring them to the masses. It still had all of the slightly insane moments as their last few records, but it was easier to grasp onto a song like ‘My Wave’ than the weird detours that you would get halfway through Ultramega OK.
Despite being in the game for over a decade, Cornell thought that Superunknown marked a major turning point for where the group was headed, saying, “That was kind of our reinvention period. It’s like, we’ve been a band this long and made a lot of records, now we’re expanding on it. It was a confusing time for music, but it was shocking to see it be as big as it was.”
While it’s hard to imagine an album with songs like ‘Fell On Black Days’ not doing well, there are more than a few times where things take a weird turn. ‘4th of July’ feels like it belongs on a crusty sludge metal record, and ‘Limo Wreck’ is the kind of song that could have been pumped out by Dead Kennedys rather than anything about grunge.
Out of all the group that had either broken up or disbanded after the genre fell by the wayside, Superunknown still serves as a great send-off for the genre. Since Soundgarden would end up making something even weirder on Down on the Upside before abruptly breaking up, this could also be the moment where they officially stopped caring about whether or not they should make their big genre crossover.
