The 1993 Nirvana album Kurt Cobain was most proud of: “This is the sound we’ve had in our heads”
We all know the story: With Nevermind, Nirvana hit the jackpot, or more famously, they knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the US charts, no small feat for a snotty band butting heads with the ‘King of Pop’ himself.
Initially, Kurt Cobain and co were pretty chuffed with themselves. For the most part, it was a huge step-up from their indie debut Bleach, made with $600 and a burning desire to escape the boredom of anonymity, the sacriligeous nothingness of small-town dissatisfaction.
But quickly, as mainstream success became a reality, not a wish, the glossy sheen of Nevermind began to irk the trio. Don’t just take my word for it; when Nirvana came hurtling back with their third, and final, studio album, In Utero, Cobain made sure that the entry point read all but read, ‘Fuck you, Nevermind‘.
On In Utero’s opener, ‘Serve the Servants’, Cobain drawls cynically, “Teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old”. Halo-haired Cobain liked his music, but he didn’t like where the music was at, and that meant In Utero was infused with all the confused pain of wishing to belong to a space and time that he never felt that he belonged to, sprinkled with obscurity, mystery and ambiguity.
With this in mind, In Utero was an exercise in shoving everybody out of the room they’d leaked into via Nevermind. And, thanks to their greasy punk sensibility and irked iciness, Nirvana loved the album for its active sonic push-back. At the time, it might’ve been the only connective tissue between a group starting to fracture under the spotlight.
In an interview in 1993, Cobain said about the release, “Chris [Novoselic] and Dave [Grohl] and I are totally excited about it. This is the sound we’ve had in our heads that we’ve never been able to transfer. This is the sound that we always felt Nirvana should have, so we finally found a producer who would do that.”
Cobain and co were helped in bucketloads by heroic producer Steve Albini, who had shared with the group his latest project, PJ Harvey’s ferocious 1993 album, Rid of Me. The band was enthralled by the gravelly textures and raw recording style. The feelings, at the time, were mutual, as Albini gushed in the late 1990s that the band “seemed the most adventurous sonically, and the most up my alley anyway”.
It was inevitable that the project Cobain was most proud of would meet the most pushback from the label. They shouldered Albini out the door and brought in Scott Litt, known for his work with REM, to remix several key tracks, double-tracking the vocal sound to disguise the abrasive vulnerability underneath. As a result, singles like ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ were perfect for radio and carried mass-market appeal once again.
In the 1993 interview, Cobain wore the rejection like a heavy coat on his shoulders, admitting that “a lot of my friends don’t even like the record”. This, he mused, was down to Albini’s production, which “bothered them”. It’s a testament to his true artistry that he still deemed In Utero the work he was most proud to have written, despite the endless slander chirping in the background.
