30 Years of In Utero

I’m going to start this hagiography reflection on the anniversary of In Utero, strangely, by discussing its predecessor. 32 years ago, Nirvana released the seminal grunge masterpiece Nevermind. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that this album totally shook the foundations of the rock music scene, almost single-handedly setting alternative rock on the trajectory that has made it one of the dominant forms of cultural expression over the last three decades. It also shook the foundations of the band that made it. In a bid to build the band’s profile off the back of the ripples that their raw debut Bleach was causing in the underground scene of the Pacific northwest, Cobain and co signed with major label DGC and enlisted Butch Vig to produce their sophomore release. No one could have been prepared for just how successful that process would prove to be. Such was the overnight nature of the band’s success, legend has it that the trio were confused to see a crowd queuing for several blocks from the window of their tour van on the way to a small club gig in a small town the week of the album’s release, worrying that they had somehow been booked to play on the same night as a major artist was attending another venue and fearing for their audience numbers, only to come to the realisation as they neared their destination that the masses of people had accumulated to see them. The initial excitement did not take long to give way to resentment. Cobain in particular has since expressed his disappointment with the record on multiple occasions, unhappy with the cleaner, more accessible sound encouraged by the new label and brought through in Vig’s production. The associated fame also had a huge effect on the band’s mental health, and would prove a major factor in Cobain’s mental decline and eventual suicide. Just a year after the release of Nevermind, Nirvana were playing to 40,000 people at Reading Festival, openly parodying and implicitly mocking their own songs.

The creative disassociation that categorised this period of Nirvana’s evolution was replaced wholesale for their third and final studio release In Utero. Hiring Steve Albini to produce in appreciation of his raw and subtle work on Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, the band began working on a project that would truly represent both their abrasive and austere beginnings, and their creative evolution and constantly improving musicality. The result was not just their most thorough, diverse, inspired and explosive work, but in my opinion the absolute zenith of guitar-led music, and quite possibly one of the greatest albums ever made, the supreme distillation and culmination of four decades of developments in electric instrumentation and the raucous, expressive, passionate musicmaking that categorises the idiom of rock music. Where Nevermind exposed the shallowness of hair metal and glam rock, In Utero gave the world the blueprints for the scaffold that would be erected on their grave. It reminded a world that had forgotten how to be genuine of their humanity and their baseness, of the adulteration of their corporeal beings and the emotional potential of their conscious minds. The album both awakens something primal and hedonistic within us and challenges us to be better and to think bigger. It is simultaneously an album of great vulgarity and great beauty, which is epitomised by the closing track All Apologies, for my money the greatest song Cobain ever wrote.

As we reach three decades since the release of this record, I can’t help but feel that there is still so much of it to uncover. Though I’ve listened to it many times, there is always something to delight or confuse for the first time. What a shame and a blessing that this should be the last word from one of the most important bands of all time.