30 years of Nirvana’s In Utero

September 21, 2023

30 years ago today, in 1993, Nirvana put out their third and last studio album, In Utero.

“Serve the Servants” kicks off the album perfectly with a chaotically discordant chord (like the ’90s equivalent to the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night”). The first line is a droll take on the band’s success: “Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old.” At the end of each chorus, Kurt Cobain seemingly mocks himself for overdramatizing how he was affected by his parents’ divorce in interviews: “That legendary divorce is such a bore!” The song is unusual in that the singing in the chorus is in a lower register and more relaxed than in the verse; the other way around is far more common.

“Heart-Shaped Box,” the first single from the album, is the one song on In Utero that sounds like what listeners to the poppier Nevermind would have expected from a follow-up. Krist Novoselic explained that songs like this and “All Apologies” were “gateways” to the rest of the album, which would cause more people to discover the album’s “aggressive wild sound — a true alternative record.”

“Dumb” serves the same role on In Utero as “Polly” does on Nevermind. Both are track 6 of a 12-song album, and they have a similar chord progression. But “Dumb” is more fully satisfying, with atmospheric cello adding depth to the soft side of the band. The cellist on this song and “All Apologies” was Kera Schaley, the only musician to play on a Nirvana studio album without being in the band.

“Milk It” is an aggressively un-commercial song with shockingly dissonant guitar playing. One line is heart-breaking knowing what happened the next year: “Look on the bright side is suicide.”

“Pennyroyal Tea” was going to be released as the third single from the album in April 1994 (following “All Apologies”), but the single was canceled because of Cobain’s suicide that month. He looked forward to the afterlife in an oddly non-rhyming couplet: “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld/So I can sigh eternally.” Cobain said: “The song is about a person who’s beyond depressed; they’re in their death bed, pretty much.” Asked about the Leonard Cohen line, Cobain said: “That was my therapy, when I was depressed and sick. I’d … listen to Leonard Cohen, which would actually make it worse.” After Cobain died, Cohen was asked about that line in an MTV interview:

“I’m sorry I couldn’t have spoken to the young man,” Cohen said of Cobain, recognizing some of his own past excesses in Cobain’s downfall. “I see a lot of people at the Zen Center, who have gone through drugs and found a way out that is not just Sunday school. There are always alternatives, and I might have been able to lay something on him. Or maybe not.”

“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is one of my favorite Nirvana songs, with manically oscillating guitar noise over relentlessly thumping drums. Most of the song isn’t radio-friendly, but it gets most melodic in the bridge, with Cobain offering uncharacteristically straightforward advice: “Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends/Find, find your place/Speak, speak the truth.”

“All Apologies” brings the album to a bittersweet close, culminating in a meditative chant over droning guitars. Cobain had this song around since 1990, before Nevermind. When Dave Grohl heard a demo of it in the early days, he thought: “This guy has such a beautiful sense of melody — I can’t believe he’s screaming all the time.”