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All three of Nirvana’s studio albums sound different, but Nevermind stands out as the moody middle child going through a growth spurt and an identity crisis at the same time. Lying between the ragged, unpolished sound of Bleach and the more “organic” heaviness of In Utero, Nirvana’s sophomore album blends polished alt-rock sonics with grungy distortion and swirling chorus effects.
But despite being the outlier in the trilogy, Nevermind is the album that took Nirvana from the Seattle/Olympia underground scene to heavy rotation on MTV. Full of contrast and tension, the album contains some of the band’s biggest hits (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “Lithium”, “Come as You Are”), but also some of the most haunting (“Something in the Way”) and unhinged (“Endless, Nameless”).
The record also transformed producer Butch Vig’s career, leading him to work with era-defining acts like The Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth as well as drawing attention to his own band, Garbage. Recorded and mixed across four different studios, the making of Nevermind is quite the saga, but it all started in Madison, Wisconsin.
Nevermind Demo Sessions at Smart Studios
After Nirvana released Bleach on Sub Pop in 1989, the nascent indie label’s founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman were keen to put out a follow-up while the “Seattle sound” was hot (thanks to bands like Mudhoney and Tad). Looking to the similarly underground Midwest scene for inspiration, they were captivated by the noisy post-punk sound of Killdozer’s Twelve Point Buck, which was produced by Butch Vig at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin.
Nirvana was scheduled to play in Madison in early April 1990, so Sub Pop booked them for a week of sessions with Vig in hopes of banging out a sophomore album (tentatively titled Sheep) for a September release. While that ultimately didn’t pan out, the Smart Studios sessions allowed Vig and the band (including bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Chad Channing) an opportunity to get comfortable with each other, especially during Cobain’s volatile moods.
“In the studio, I was taking my time to set up, and I could tell Kurt was getting impatient,” Vig told Uncut in 2021. “We tracked the first song and did a couple of takes when Kurt put his guitar down and went and sat in the corner. I tried to talk to him, but Krist [Novoselic] explained he got into these moods. You had to let him go through it, and he’d eventually snap out of it. Eventually, Kurt stood up and said, ‘Let’s go,’ and we cut the first song.”
On top of that, there was palpable tension between Cobain and Channing, which came to a head during the recording of “Lithium”, when Cobain got so fed up with the drummer that he took his place at the kit to show him how he wanted the parts played. Navigating Nirvana’s interpersonal dynamics was a challenge for the Midwest-nice Vig, but with Novoselic as a peacekeeper and go-between, he managed to keep the sessions running and produce a solid eight-song demo.
Sonically, the demos are a far cry from the polished sound of the final album, but much closer to the Black Sabbath/early Melvins heaviness the band originally wanted. Part of that sound comes from Vig putting Cobain’s guitar through a Fender Bassman bass amp on “In Bloom” and “Lithium” to minimize excess treble on the high-gain tones.
Most of the tracking was done live, and Cobain was reluctant to do much overdubbing, but Vig nudged him to try double-tracking some of his guitar parts and even add in a few leads.
But the drums are much bigger and roomier than anything from the ‘70s or ‘80s, a quality that would later become a defining element of ‘90s rock. A drummer himself, Vig loaned Channing his own snare (the same one he used for The Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish), covered the studio floor in plywood for a more reflective sound, and set up a stereo pair of AKG C451 room mics to capture the explosive reverb that makes the drums pop through the wall of distortion.
While the Smart demos were an important step in developing the Nevermind sound, only one of the songs ended up on the final album. “Polly” was the last song to be recorded, and the magic was captured in a quick-and-dirty late-night session where Cobain played a poorly tuned five-string acoustic accompanied only by Novoselic’s bass and a few cymbal overdubs. While tracking vocals, Cobain came in early before the third verse, but Vig decided to leave the false start in the track.
Unfortunately, the sessions were cut short before Sheep could be completed. “There were a couple songs that Kurt hadn't finished lyrics on, and he sort of blew his voice out about the fourth or fifth day he sang so hard,” Vig says in the documentary Classic Albums: Nirvana - Nevermind. “Jonathan flew in from Sub Pop and heard the stuff and loved it and then said, ‘Well, we'll get him back here in like three, four weeks. We'll just come in and finish the last songs and then do a proper mix.’ And then I didn't hear anything for a while.”
While Nirvana headed out to tour the Midwest and East Coast, Vig mixed the eight tracks they managed to complete before switching gears to record The Smashing Pumpkins’ second single, “Tristessa”, for Sub Pop. Little did he know, Sub Pop was in financial trouble, and both bands would soon ditch the label, but Gish would soon become another seminal ‘90s album.
New Drummer, New Songs, New Label
Sometime after the Smart sessions, Channing left Nirvana due to friction with Cobain and disappointment with being excluded from songwriting. While the band was briefly without a drummer, Dan Peters of Mudhoney played on the single “Sliver,” and Dale Crover of the Melvins sat in for a short tour with Sonic Youth in August.
Later that fall, Cobain and Novoselic saw the D.C. hardcore band Scream and were floored by their drummer, Dave Grohl. When Scream broke up shortly afterward, the Melvins’ King Buzzo put Grohl in touch with Nirvana, and by October, they had already played their first show with their new drummer.
“Once Dave joined, Nirvana was just like a tight machine,” Novoselic says in Classic Albums. “It just all fell into place. So I don't know if it was providence or what; something guided us to get together, and you could feel the impact right away.”
“We had that sort of do-it-yourself punk rock ethic that we all shared,” Grohl adds. “I don't think it would've worked if one person didn't have that. I mean, honestly, there was hardly any career ambition at all. We knew that there was no way we could be the biggest band in the world. We just wanted to play.”
Not too long after joining the band, Grohl moved in with Cobain at his triplex in Olympia, Washington. Much of the writing of Nevermind happened there and in Nirvana’s rehearsal space in nearby Tacoma, especially after Cobain’s breakup with Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail. One of the last songs written for the album was “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, which gets its title from a phrase Vail’s bandmate Kathleen Hannah wrote on Cobain’s wall after vandalizing a pregnancy center with graffiti.
While the songs were taking shape, Vig’s demo recordings were making the rounds in a low-key bidding war. Through a recommendation from Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Nirvana ended up signing with DGC Records (a Geffen Records imprint) on April 30, 1991. The label offered an advance of $287,000 (minus legal fees and the cost of buying out Sub Pop); more money than the underground rockers had ever seen.
Nirvana’s new label proposed a few possible producers (Scott Litt, David Briggs and Don Dixon), but the band opted to stick with Vig, whom they already felt comfortable with and whose recordings had already landed them a deal. “One reason why we decided to do Nevermind with Butch was how patient he is,” Novoselic says in Classic Albums. “And it was such a great experience working with him in Madison. The label wanted us to work with other people, but it was kind of intimidating, and we were comfortable with Butch.”
“First I got a call from the band asking if I wanted to engineer the record,” Vig told Billboard in 2011. Then, “With about two weeks before they went into the studio, they called and asked if I wanted to produce the record, and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ It was kind of my first major-label project.” The band wanted to record in Los Angeles, so Vig chose Sound City Studios due to its large live room, its Neve 8028 console, and its role in classic recordings by Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, and Cheap Trick.
Sound City
Nirvana arrived in Los Angeles at the end of April 1991, just after debuting “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at a show in Seattle. Before heading into the studio, they spent a few days at a rehearsal space in North Hollywood to flesh out the songs and tighten up the arrangements. Vig stopped by a few times to hear their progress, but deliberately avoided overworking the band in pre-production so that the songs wouldn’t lose their magic.
May 2nd, 1991 was Nirvana’s first day in Studio A at Sound City. “It wasn't the Hollywood studio that I imagined it to be,” Grohl remarks in Classic Albums (several years before he bought the studio’s famous console and made a documentary about it). “It wasn't Capitol Record Studios or A&M Studios. It was out in the middle of Van Nuys in the valley in this small warehouse district. But you walk in and walk down the hallway, and you see Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors and some Tom Petty records on the wall. Some classic albums had been done there.”
Drums and Bass
Like most great rock records, the first step in recording Nevermind was getting the rhythm section to sound tight and powerful. To that end, Vig extended Grohl’s kick drum an extra six feet by building a tunnel of headless drum shells, then mic’d it with an AKG D12 and a slightly more distant Neumann U 47 FET condenser.
The rest of the mic’ing was pretty typical for ‘90s rock: an SM57 and AKG 451 on the snare, Sennheiser MD 421 tom mics, and AKG 414 overheads complemented by Neumann KM 184 cymbal mics and U 87 room mics. The result is a punchy and resonant drum sound that pokes out beautifully in the clean sections and blends in with the heavy sections without ever getting in the way of the bass and guitars.
“I like to put a couple of mics on the bass, even though I usually only end up using one,” Vig told Sound on Sound. “On Nevermind we placed a FET 47 and an [Electro Voice] RE20, and we then just used the 47, which has more of a thumpy, mid‑range sound to it.” Augmenting the bass mic was a Tech 21 SansAmp DI, which Vig liked because “You can dirty it up, you can add some tone to it, and it's just much more usable as a DI signal as opposed to a straight DI, which to me sounds really thin.”
Guitars
Grunge is all about the guitars, and one of Vig’s biggest contributions was pushing Cobain to explore different tones, often alternating between chorusy clean sounds, gritty overdrive, and multilayered walls of distortion. Again, the Fender Bassman played a key role, alongside a Mesa Boogie, Marshall, and Vox AC30.
Not many pedals were used, but there were two that played a significant role in the sound of the album. The Electro-Harmonix Small Clone chorus can be heard all over the album, especially on songs like “Come As You Are”, where it was double-tracked for a “wide and watery” sound, as Vig puts it. A RAT distortion pedal lent a fuzzier texture than amps alone could produce, and on “Breed”, an amp wasn’t even used, just the RAT straight into the board.
Vocals and Overdubs
Most of Cobain’s lead vocals were recorded in the smaller Studio B using a Neumann U67 through a Teletronix LA-2A compressor to rein in his considerable dynamics. “He could scream, and it would have this great rasp and tone to it, and yet he could also bring it down really quiet and sound so world‑weary and exhausted and intimate,” Vig says in the Sound on Sound interview. “In the studio I used a fair amount of compression on the vocals so that I could control his dynamics, and I also got Kurt to do some double‑tracking.”
Vocals were being stacked from the very first song they recorded. “After we did the basic take and had Kurt's vocal down, we had Dave come in and do harmonies on the chorus,” Vig says in the Classic Albums segment covering “In Bloom”. “Their voices sound pretty cool together; very similar tone quality. And I thought it might sound better if they doubled it because it's going to just make it fuller a little bit richer, so we went back and Kurt did a double track. And again, he didn't like doing double tracks, so I had to use the John Lennon reference, and every time he resisted, I said, "John Lennon did it." He'd go, "Okay."
“Something in the Way” features Cobain at his softest, but capturing the intimate quality of that song turned out to be one of the biggest challenges. After several failed attempts to record it with the band, Cobain got frustrated and came into the control room to show Vig how he wanted it to sound. As the story goes, he laid on the control room couch with the same five-stringed guitar from “Polly” and began singing almost at a whisper.
“I was like, ‘Okay, stop, stop, stop,’ and I quickly grabbed a couple mics and plugged them in,” Vig recalls in the documentary. “I unplugged the phone, I turned the fans off in the tape machine, and said, ‘This is it. Just do what you think you need to do right now.’ And I literally held my breath for three minutes while he sang it.”
“As we went back and overdubbed, it was very difficult for both Chris and Dave to do the drums and bass because with no click track, the timing was kind of all over the place,” Vig continues. “At some points, we punched bar by bar just to make sure it was really languid. When Dave was doing the drums, Kurt was in the back of the control room saying, ‘Quieter, quieter, quieter.’” The song was one of the last to come together, with Kirk Canning’s cello recorded on the very last day of tracking.
Mixing Nevermind
The mixing of Nevermind happened in a few different stages, beginning with a first pass by Vig in Sound City’s Studio B. Cobain had been pushing for a raw, heavy sound with buried vocals and rolled-off guitars, which went against Vig’s instincts, but the producer ultimately delivered. According to Vig, the band mixed “Endless, Nameless” themselves.
Even in the rough mix stage, everyone seemed to agree that they had something special. “I remember Butch putting up the rough mixes after Kurt laid the vocals down,” Novoselic says in Classic Albums. “He'd crank it in the control room, and it would just come out just like a barrage, like, 'Wow, did we do that?’”
“I remember around the time we finished doing rough mixes and listening to everything back to back that I thought all the songs were really, really strong,” says Vig. “I kept thinking, ‘Man, maybe there's an audience out there. We might go beyond their Sub Pop crowd. Maybe we can sell a couple hundred thousand records.’”
The Devonshire Mixes
When Nirvana’s time at Sound City was up, Vig did a second round of mixes (plus a few vocal and guitar fixes) at Devonshire Sound Studios in North Hollywood. While none of these “Devonshire mixes” ended up on the record, they were finally released on the 20th anniversary Super Deluxe Edition of Nevermind:
According to a Slate article around the time of that release, In Utero engineer Steve Albini wrote on the Electrical Audio message board that “While we were working on In Utero, the band would occasionally play other recordings of theirs in the control room for reference, or when trying to describe a part to one another. They had a cassette of the rough (Butch) mix of Nevermind, and it sounded maybe 200 times more ass-kicking than what I remember of the released version.”
Listening to those mixes, you can still hear many of the production choices that make Nevermind what it is, like the chorus-soaked guitars, the kick drum tunnel, and the DI guitar and fuzz bass on “Breed,” but presented in a less polished, slightly more punk way.
Compared to the final mixes, the guitars are warmer overall and noticeably louder in places, while the drums have less reverb on some songs and more on others. The cello in “Something in the Way” sits further back in the mix, the call-and-response vocals on “Breed” are barely audible, and “Territorial Pissings” opens with guitar buzz instead of the “Everybody get together” intro. (The only songs Vig didn’t remix were “Polly” and “Endless, Nameless”, presumably because the band was already happy with them.)
Andy Wallace’s Final Mixes
In retrospect, those early mixes seem closer to the sound Cobain wanted; but for whatever reason, Vig and the band agreed that it was time to get some fresh ears on the record and started looking for a new mixer. The label’s A&R rep put forward a list of mixers including Scott Litt (R.E.M.) and Ed Stasium (the Smithereens), but Cobain made the decision to go with Andy Wallace due to his work on Slayer’s South of Heaven.
“I think [...] one of the reasons Kurt wanted the record to sound heavy was because he knew the songs were really hooky,” Vig says in Classic Albums. “They were really poppy, lots of pop melodies, and he didn't want to come across as sounding too poppy. So if the guitars are roaring and really thick and really heavy and the drums are pounding, that dichotomy I think would work for him.”
Wallace mixed his version of Nevermind in early June on the SSL G Series console at Scream Studios. “While mixing, I did not try to polish it at all,” he told Sound on Sound in 2014. “I was trying to keep the sound in your face and raw, while at the same time providing the dynamics and architecture that I like to hear.” In this case, “rawness” is more of a vibe than a literal approach, as Wallace made heavy use of digital reverbs and drum samples to bring out what couldn’t be captured in the room.
Quoted in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Vig explains, “Part of the reason why the album sounds so slick is that the room miking of the drums didn't work out well and so Wallace used digital reverb to fix the sound and further pumped up the drums with equalization and some samples that he blended in behind the kick drum and snare.” (Wallace has said that he mainly uses samples to drive reverbs, often tuning them with EQ to tailor the sound of the ambience).
Before the mixes were finalized, Vig took a tape back to Wisconsin and played it on a boombox during a Fourth of July picnic. “There were probably 30 or 40 musicians hanging out,” he recalled to Billboard. “They all stopped and crowded around the boombox to listen. And when it was done, I remember there was silence. And somebody said, ‘Oh my God, play the record again.’” 
The Release of Nevermind
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the airwaves on August 27th, 1991, and the full album landed in stores on September 24th (followed by the MTV premiere of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” a few days later). While everyone involved knew they had made something special, nobody was prepared for just how big Nevermind would become. Half of the first 46,000 copies released in the US went to the Pacific Northwest, where it quickly sold out and caused Geffen to pause production on other albums in order to fill the demand.
But that success had its challenges, too. The punk-minded band from Washington was not prepared to be thrust into the spotlight, and the sudden exposure and pressure hit Cobain the hardest. The singer soon began talking negatively about the sound of Nevermind and wanted the next record to recapture the rawness of Bleach. “When I listen to Nevermind, I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times,” he told Slate before his death.
“Some of that desire may have been influenced by the incredible and unexpectedly huge success of Nevermind, and what that did to his career and his life,” Wallace told Sound on Sound. “If that success had not happened, there might not have been the fuss about the album supposedly being polished-sounding.”
But whatever Cobain thought about the sound of Nevermind, that “polish” is certainly part of the reason it was able to reach mainstream audiences. From the angsty teens who heard it on the radio to the people whose careers were launched by it, the record undoubtedly impacted everyone it touched.
“It’s safe to say that the record changed the lives of those who were closely involved,” Vig told Billboard. “Early on, it sort of freaked me out, because I realized that I’d never have a record as big and commercially successful.”
Reflecting on the record in the Classic Albums documentary, Grohl says, “When I listen to that album, I hear a sense of purity and honesty that I haven't heard in a long time.” Novoselic calls it “Undeniably the best thing I ever did in my whole life,” but the very best quote comes from Steve Diggle of the Buzzcocks: “You've got to give the music business a kick in the balls now again, and that's what [Cobain] did. And that's why it's a classic album.”
