The Nirvana album their label thought was unreleasable
There’s a good chance that any album released in 1993 with the name Nirvana on it was guaranteed to sell. Although the band had no plans of becoming one of the biggest bands in the world, Kurt Cobain crafted the perfect answer to all of the phoniness MTV had to offer, turning Nevermind into one of the greatest albums of the decade overnight. While the usual plan may have been to do everything over again, Cobain wanted to go in the opposite direction, which became a nightmare for the record company.
Instead of going the safe route of working with a well-respected producer, Nirvana elected to work with Steve Albini, having been known for his work with various indie bands like Pixies and Jesus Lizard. After disagreements with the higher-ups, the goal was to bash the album out within a few days, settling into Albini’s Pachyderm Studios to create the album.
Once they got going, the band turned in some of the most caustic songs of their career. Featuring Albini’s traditional sizzling production, Dave Grohl’s drums sounded thunderous in the room, matched only by Cobain’s visceral shriek across tracks like ‘Scentless Apprentice’ and ‘Serve the Servants’.
Even though the album contained soon-to-be hits like ‘Heart Shaped Box’ and ‘Dumb’, the production became far too heavy than anyone had ever anticipated. When talking about the reception from the record company, Dave Grohl remembered that their label thought they were playing a joke on them, thinking that the album was far too unpolished to be the sequel to Nevermind.
According to Albini, the album was in danger of not being released, recalling, “They turn up with this record, which I think is a really good record and a really good document of where the band were at the time. [The record label] is confronted with this music that is sometimes quite ugly and pretty bracing, and their initial reaction is that it’s awful and they can’t release, and they have to do it again”.
While the band stuck by their vision for the album, Cobain acquiesced by complaining that the vocals tended to get buried in the mix. Outside of a few touchups, Scott Litt was also brought in to mix the final singles for the album, having worked the same magic for R.E.M. a few years before.
Despite the growing concern from the label, In Utero would become one of Nirvana’s greatest musical achievements, reflecting the aftershocks of being in a platinum rock band after knowing the security of the punk squalors. Even though the band were graduating to playing stadiums worldwide, no one could have predicted how real Cobain’s pain actually was.
After fighting tooth and nail to release the record, the lead singer was still not satisfied with his place in the world, hating playing stadium shows for millions of people and wanting to quit the music industry altogether before committing suicide in his home in 1994. For all of the darkness captured on In Utero, Cobain had never been more honest about his state of mind than he was on his unintended swan song.
