Album Anniversary: Nirvana Is Anything but Transcendent on ‘In Utero’

Nirvana’s third and final album lives on as an anthem for post-teenage sadness 30 years after its release.

Written by Anjali Krishna

Photo courtesy of Everett

Content Warning: This article includes mentions of general violence, suicide, and rape.

As Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s personal issues with fatherhood, marriage, and addiction increasingly garnered press coverage, he decided he needed to get away. He yearned to escape from his reality of stalking cameras and perjurious headlines — a getaway only possible by leaving behind the too-polished music that made him famous. Though Nirvana’s iconic Nevermind moved alternative music to the mainstream, In Utero memorializes the band at their unapologetically violent best.

Nirvana holed up in a recording studio in Minnesota, creating an album which leaned into a gorier side they had only grazed the surface of in Nevermind. Loud, raunchy, and deafeningly sad, In Utero explores post-teenage grief and an adjustment to adulthood gone wrong. At age 26, Cobain sings in “Serve the Servants,” "Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I'm bored and old." Indeed, Cobain would die by suicide one year later. To some Nirvana fans, this final album serves as a pseudo suicide note. 

Sonically, In Utero’s sound is simultaneously more lo-fi and harsher than their previous works k. It belonged to the independent grunge producer Steve Albini, who the band had to convince to join them on the record as he was reluctant to create music for a band so popular. Albini’s fears came true: Nirvana was not satisfied with Albini’s production. Their speech, on the first version of the record, was nearly incomprehensible. After a public controversy in the press of why Nirvana would not release the album, they got permission from Albini to rework a few tracks with other producers. The resulting album was an amalgamation of rock and pop — a stark contrast from song to song that unashamedly forms a new style for NIrvana.

As In Utero bridges the space between radio-friendly and rated-X, Cobain expresses self-hatred in every form he can find it. Whereas “Milk It” is abrasive from its beginning, “Rape Me” begins in elegant classical rock, and descends into a chaotic full band sound. Both are unkind to their singer, as Cobain recites the titular words as well as more grisly images in “Milk It”: “I am my own parasite.” “Milk It” is almost certainly one of Nirvana’s most gory songs, with “suicide” as a bright side and “pet viruses” nesting in Cobain’s home. The bloody violence of the record removed it forcefully from the mainstream.

Perhaps Cobain is remarking on his fall from heavenly grace; the commercial success of Nevermind and his following descent to depression and public humiliation. He’s “Out of the ground / Into the sky / Out of the sky / Into the dirt.” Whether the sky is heaven or whether the dirt is a grave, the audience is left to interpret.

Image courtesy of Universal Music Group

Cobain shows a snarkier side on In Utero: “if you ever need anything please don’t / hesitate to ask someone else first.” It’s less of the anthemic statement of a generation than it might have been on a previous album, and his ire feels self-conscious and destructive. The Nirvana frontman and writer is angry about something, certainly: his fans, the world, himself. He follows up almost immediately with, “I’m too busy acting like I’m not naive” on “Very Ape” and then with a repetitive conclusion about his stupidity on “Dumb.” Angry as he is, he’s strikingly self-aware, willing to admit anything and everything. He “misses the comfort in being sad” on “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge in Seattle,” and could that be where it all goes wrong? Sadness is containing, self-awareness is pressing. Over a heavy base and skimming electric guitar on “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter,” he asks, “What is wrong with me / What do I think of me?” Before he descends into repeating his questions for himself, he offers advice: “Hate your enemies / Save your friends / Find your peace / Speak the truth.” These messages apply to himself and his young listeners, both searching for universal truths. These, at least, Cobain knows the answers to.

Struggling with fatherhood and family life is a primary theme; Cobain’s daughter, Frances, was one when the album was released. He explores his faults by reflecting on his own father (“I tried hard to have a father, but instead I have a dad”) in “Serve the Servants.” One of his most personal songs, he writes about the media portraying his wife, Courtney Love of Hole, as a bad mother: “If she floats then she is not / A witch like we had thought.” In “Heart-Shape Box,” Cobain returns to gore to disturbingly express his love for Love: “Wish I could eat your cancer / when you turn black.” Or perhaps he’s just obsessed with her, “Locked inside [her] heart shaped box” and “Drawn into [her] magnet tar pit trap.” It’s sexual yet violent, the way he sings “throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back.” He villainizes her as some unearthly goddess with the power to kidnap, love, and strangle him all at once. In the screaming “Tourette’s,” he refers to the “mean heart, cold heart” of the “queen of lies.” Track by track, Cobain forms the most Nirvana way to convey his shifting feelings towards Love. 

While the studio version of In Utero has its own charm, the tracks “Pennyroyal Tea” and “All Apologies” come alive on the fan-favorite MTV Unplugged record. The former becomes more somber, with Cobain’s enunciations more pronounced and his guitar less blaring. The track turns sad: a sonic explanation for all he must cure with his drug habits. The effects of Cobain’s lifestyle on his body become depressing to hear — unromantic in comparison to the studio track. The melody in “All Apologies” becomes otherworldly as he repeats, “All in all is all we are.” Cobain takes the blame from fans, his band, his wife (married is paralleled with buried in “All Apologies”). He ends with the popular Buddhist philosophy, however, resigned to this idea of oneness and universal centrality. Soon, he seems to know, he will return to the earth.

Thirty years after its release, In Utero is world-renowned as a rock staple. It speaks, it sings, to struggling youths, with Dave Grohl’s heavy drums blaring out the noise in their heads. The album lives on as a commiseration of misery, as it tracks the creation of anger from depression. For the kids who listen to the album, it’s a savior. Its only fault is that it couldn’t be the same for Cobain.