Bleach by Nirvana

Bleach, Nirvana's debut album, came out on Sub Pop on June 15, 1989, and it's the sludgiest, meanest thing they ever put out. After their first single, "Love Buzz", hit the shelves in November 1988, the band spent two or three weeks rehearsing, then cut the bulk of the album with Jack Endino at Reciprocal Recording in Seattle between December 1988 and January 1989. It's the only Nirvana album on Sub Pop.

Kurt Cobain sings and plays guitar, Krist Novoselic plays bass and Chad Channing is on drums, and the sound is thick, slow and grimy, the riffs dragging like wet cement while Cobain's voice goes from a sneer to a throat-shredding howl. "Negative Creep", "Blew" and "School" grind and pummel, but "About a Girl" gives the game away: a jangling pop song hiding in the murk, a hint of the melodic instincts that would change everything two years later.

It didn't chart at first, though critics liked it, and it had sold 40,000 copies in North America before Nevermind broke. Geffen's 1992 reissue took it to number 89 on the Billboard 200, 33 in the UK and 34 in Australia, and after Cobain's death in April 1994 it went all the way to number one on the Top Pop Catalog Albums chart. It has since gone platinum, passed 1.9 million copies in the US and become the biggest seller Sub Pop has ever had. A 20th anniversary edition in 2009 added a live 1990 show from Portland, Oregon.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.