Steve Albini reflects on making Nirvana's final album In Utero

It's been 30 years since the release of Nirvana's multi-platinum third and final album, In Utero, which came out just seven months before Kurt Cobain's death in 1994.

Following the success of Nevermind — one of the best-selling records of all time, with massive guitar riffs and double tracked vocals — Cobain wanted to try something different, something less polished and more reminiscent of the band's early work.

Nirvana hired musician and recording engineer Steve Albini to help them produce In Utero's raw and complex sound. And while the album was met with mixed feelings in 1993, today it's widely regarded as a classic ahead of its time.

In an interview with Q's Tom Power, Albini takes us back to the making of the record, starting with a modest appraisal of his own contributions.

"Over the years, I feel like I have gotten a lot of undue attention for the sake of records that I worked on that would have been remarkable records regardless of who was in the chair making them — and I think this is a pretty good example," he says.

"The record was recorded in a conventional fashion and in very spartan arrangements. And I think, you know, a monkey of a certain intellectual capacity could have been trained to make that record and it would have been just as good, in my opinion."

But Nirvana's record label wasn't on board for the more abrasive sound the band wanted to explore, fearing that it wouldn't have commercial appeal.

"Nirvana were interested in working with me specifically as a departure from the sort of career arc that was expected of them, which was — having made a huge smash hit record — to just go back into the studio with the same or a similar circumstance and make another smash hit record," says Albini.

"They wanted to thwart that by making a record in the style that they were accustomed to prior to their massive success…. What they were being asked to do was to make another one of the same record that they had just previously made that was hugely successful — and they didn't want to make the same record again, they wanted to make a different record."

Albini says he wasn't daunted by the expectations of Nirvana's third album. "Literally from the first song that they ran through, I knew it was going to be a good record and we didn't have anything to worry about," he tells Power.

"The thing that impressed me the most was when the time came for [Kurt] to do the final vocals for the album, we had several days left in the session — and plenty of time for him to take a leisurely pace in recording the vocals — but he basically just started at the beginning and sang the whole album. Like it was one fairly long session, I want to say eight or 10 hours, and he sang, basically, the entire album. He may have redone a song or two the following day, but he essentially sang the whole record in one go."

The full interview with Steve Albini is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He also talks about what he thinks really matters in music, how mistakes are actually important and why mythmaking makes things less interesting. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Steve Albini produced by Mitch Pollock.

Q39:42Producer Steve Albini on Nirvana’s In Utero