Sleeve notes
Nirvana
Nevermind · 1991
Nirvana formed in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987, built around the songwriting of Kurt Cobain, whose melodic instincts and love of the Pixies' quiet-loud dynamics fused with a hardcore- and noise-rock-schooled underground sensibility absorbed from Black Flag, the Melvins, and the broader Pacific Northwest DIY scene the band came up in. Early releases on Sub Pop placed them within the loosely defined grunge scene, though Cobain's own reference points ran wider and stranger than that label suggested — Sonic Youth, R.E.M., and the Vaselines all left visible marks on his writing.
Nevermind (1991) took the band's underground songcraft and pushed it through a cleaner, more compressed production, and its reach far outstripped anything the band or its label expected, pulling large parts of American alternative rock into the mainstream almost overnight. Cobain remained ambivalent about that reach for the rest of the band's brief existence, repeatedly distancing Nirvana from the more macho, apolitical hard-rock scene it was often lumped in with, and continuing to point interviewers toward the underground bands — Sonic Youth, the Breeders, the Vaselines, Daniel Johnston — he considered the real foundation of what he was doing.
