(Credits: Far Out / HBO Documentary Films)
Wed 31 December 2025 20:45, UK
By the time that Nirvana blew up, Kurt Cobain was never going to take the term ‘grunge’ all that seriously.
He may have liked the idea of a lot of people liking his band, but there was a lot more to it than simply cashing in on the trend of flannel shirts. The corporate side of the business wasn’t something that appealed to him at all, and when he talked about his own body of work, he wanted to make it his personal mission to leave the genre labels behind when working on his material.
After all, grunge had already been a buzzword since before Nirvana even formed. Melvins and Mudhoney had been early adopters of that DIY sound that bridged punk rock with heavy Black Sabbath riffs, and while Bleach does have a lot of the hallmarks of that sound, Cobain wasn’t exactly looking to become a second-rate Melvins. He wanted something more, and Nevermind took everything about Seattle and turned it into a calling card for alternative rock.
Which is strange because, stylistically, there’s nothing about Nevermind that necessarily screams ‘grunge’ in the traditional sense. The guitars are roaring, yes, but there’s a lot more tunefulness behind Cobain’s melodies that are straight-up Beatlesque in places. It’s easy to picture Mudhoney performing a song like ‘School’ off their first record or even tunes like ‘Breed’, but chances are people would have been dumbfounded if they tried to write a song like ‘Come As You Are’ or ‘On a Plain’.
This was a new kind of rock and roll aesthetic, and Cobain didn’t seem to like any of it. He may have been proud of the songs, but he wanted to make sure the slick production was something that never happened again. He didn’t want to be thrust into the same arenas that Guns N’ Roses were playing, and by the time that he started working on In Utero, he was determined to create the gnarliest-sounding record he could muster.
And boy did he deliver. The fact that the label nearly rejected the first cut of In Utero already primed people for a dense listening experience, but with Steve Albini’s production, the whole record feels a lot more raw than anything Nirvana would ever do. It feels like you’re practically in the room with Dave Grohl as he’s bashing away at the drums, but Cobain’s vision was for them to make the dirtiest record of their career and move on.
For them, grunge was a fad the same way hair metal was a fad, and it was best for them to keep themselves satisfied by leaving it in the dust, saying, “This album’s like the closing of the chapter that we’ve been using. Grunge is really boring for us. It’s something we can’t deny and we’re not going to stop playing the old songs live. But our tastes are just changing so rapidly that we’re really experimenting with a lot of stuff. We can’t put out another album, and this is like the last chapter of three-chord grunge music.”
Despite In Utero being considered the last hurrah in Cobain’s mind, you can hear that eagerness to break out of his shell. ‘Scentless Apprentice’ feels like grunge taken to its most chaotic conclusion, and while there were moments on MTV Unplugged that showed a different side of the band, all we have is tunes like ‘You Know You’re Right’ to see where the band could have gone next.
Any rock fan would have been desperately awaiting for what Cobain was up to next had he lived to see the end of the decade, but what he gave did at least put a flag in the sand for what Seattle stood for. It may have turned into a fashion halfway through its run, but when grunge music hit the nail on the head, there was nothing else on the radio like it.
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