In Utero by Nirvana

In Utero, Nirvana's third and last studio album, came out on DGC in September 1993, and it's the sound of a band that had conquered the mainstream with Nevermind and now wanted to scrape the shine back off. To do it they hired Steve Albini, recorded at Pachyderm Studio in February 1993, and chased the harsher, more tangled, more abrasive sound of their pre-fame days.

It worked almost too well. Once the tapes were done, rumors went around that DGC might not even put the thing out, so uncommercial was Albini's sound. Bob Ludwig mastered it to sand down some of the edges, and Scott Litt was brought in to remix the singles "All Apologies", "Heart-Shaped Box" and "Pennyroyal Tea". What's left is still gloriously ugly in places: "Scentless Apprentice" and "Serve the Servants" grind and lurch, "Rape Me" swings from a murmur to a scream, while "Dumb" and "All Apologies" show how tender Kurt Cobain could be when he let the noise drop away. He insisted the album was impersonal, but plenty of the songs point straight back at his own life, full of the same angst that ran through Nevermind.

The gamble paid off. In Utero hit number one on both the Billboard 200 and the UK Albums Chart, "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies" both topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and critics lined up to praise its lyrics and its raw, unconventional sound. It has sold 15 million copies worldwide, and it turned out to be the last studio album released before Cobain's death.

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