The songs Steve Albini thought were ruined on ‘In Utero’
After taking over the world of rock and roll in the early 1990s, all eyes were on Nirvana, wondering where they would go next. Even though they were known as an up-and-coming indie band out of the Pacific Northwest just a few months before Nevermind hit shelves, the success of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ announced a new era for rock and roll, with fans throwing out all of their leather gear and trading it in for flannel shirts. Nirvana’s music had become en vogue, and Kurt Cobain wanted to get as far away from that sound as possible with Steve Albini.
Although the band may have been proud of the songs on their magnum opus, the group’s frontman was not pleased with how everything was mixed on the record. Instead of the dry sounds that Butch Vig had come up with in Sound City Studios, engineer Andy Wallace eventually turned in a more polished version of the record, which Cobain thought sounded closer to hair metal than he intended.
Since Albini had been known for some of the starkest productions on the indie scene with acts like Pixies and Jesus Lizard, Cobain wanted to make the next album with the producer’s aesthetic in mind. Instead of hearing Nirvana as a polished entity, In Utero became one of their most potent musical statements, with Cobain becoming jaded about the harsh side of fame.
After working for a few weeks getting the basic tracks, the band thought they had a worthy successor to Nevermind, only for their label to reject it. When talking about the initial reaction, Dave Grohl remembered the album wasn’t well-received by the label, telling Sonic Highways, “When we played it for them, the reaction was, ‘You’re fucking joking, right? This is the sequel to Nevermind?’”.
While that reaction may have been precisely what the band intended for, that didn’t stop the label from sticking their nose into the final mixes. By Cobain’s admission, the vocals on the album could have benefited from being louder, leading engineer Scott Litt to finetune the mixes of the singles ‘All Apologies’ and ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, famous for working the same magic for acts like R.E.M.
Even though Albini felt that most of the songs were strong, he didn’t like the fact that the label was butting their heads into the situation, telling Louder, “We finished the mixes on that record I had a pretty good time working with Nirvana, and it remains a pretty good memory for me. After that – once the management company and record label started turning the heat up on the band and they started dropping shit into the press – it got really ugly”.
Outside of the lead singles off the project, it’s easy to hear Albini’s signature on the rest of the album cuts. Across songs like ‘Scentless Apprentice’ and ‘Milk It’, Albini’s attention to drum sounds makes for a thunderous low end behind every track, while Cobain’s vocals are brought up so far in the mix that they distort.
Despite having a hand in putting together the various anniversary remixes of the album, Albini maintains that most of the higher-ups around Nirvana at the time didn’t have the band’s creative interests at heart, explaining, “The three guys in the band were perfectly reasonable and easy for me to deal with, but literally every other person involved in that record was an asshole”.
