American rock band formed around 1986 by Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. Despite their short existence as a group, and Cobain's suicide in 1994, their music reaped tremendous success worldwide, to the point that Nirvana was considered one of the best rock bands of the time and the standard bearer of the Grunge movement.
Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic spent part of their adolescence in the city of Aberdeen (Washington State). Together they had played in some bands in the Washington area, such as The Sellouts, Skid Row or The Stiff Woodies.
Nirvana
In 1988 they recorded a demo and were offered a single by the Sub Pop label. Almost at the same time there were changes in the drummer's seat; the position was definitely taken by Chad Channing. Love Buzz was released in November of that year, and in June 1989 Bleach was released, the band's first album, fresh and bitter at the same time, produced by guru Jack Endino. That same year they were joined by Jason Everman as second guitar, an ephemeral union of only a few months, and soon after they embarked on a tour of Europe with TAD.
In May 1990, at the end of the American tour, Channing left the group. After these changes, Dave Grohl would eventually fill this position, after releasing a single, Sliver, which still featured Channing on one side and Mudhoney's Dan Peters on the other. It also marked his first collaboration with producer Butch Vig, another guru of the later so-called "Grunge movement", and better known lately for his new band, Garbage.
With Butch Vig they recorded their first album for Geffen, Nevermind, released in September 1991, which would take less than a month to sell half a million copies in the USA. The video of the first single taken from the full-length Smells like teen spirit was massively broadcasted by MTV, contributing to its rapid expansion around the globe. The album reached number one on the US charts in January 1992.
Although the move to a multinational record company affected some of the album's content, their second full-length followed the line opened by Bleach: feelings and passions prevail over technical perfection and, helped by a good promotion, they became the standard-bearers of the Grunge movement.
Cover of In utero (1993), their last album.
Shortly after, Kurt Cobain married Courtney Love, leader of the band Hole. They toured Europe in summer (Frances Bean, the couple's daughter, was born at the time) and began recording their next album at the end of that year with the legendary Steve Albini. This American producer and musician, who had been a member of Big Black and later formed Rapeman, had produced countless bands, such as The Breeders or Pixies, before working with the trio.
In Utero was the title chosen for this work, from which Heart-Shaped Box was extracted as an advance single, in September 1993. Between these two albums, Incesticide was released at the end of 1992, a compilation of B-sides and unreleased songs, a clever commercial maneuver of their label, trying to make Nirvana look like an AOR (Adult Orient Rock) group in terms of regularity, something difficult, given the particular character of Kurt Cobain.
The end of 1993 and the beginning of 1994 was tumultuous, with calls to the police from his Seattle home and a hospital stay in Rome, clear preludes to the fatal outcome: Cobain's suicide in Seattle in April 1994.
Nirvana ceased to exist as a group, and although some time later Krist Novoselic started again from the bottom with a new group called Sweet 75, with which he worked with total independence, he never achieved great international repercussion.
In 1995 Dave Grohl decided to go on his own, and recorded solo what would be his first album with a new band. Only his friend Greg Dulli (of the Afghan Whigs) helped him with some contribution in the form of electric guitar, and in the summer of 1995 the first album of The Foo Fighters was released. Once the album was released, he recruited Pat Smear (formerly of The Germs and Nirvana) and two former members of Sunny Day Real Estate, Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith, as a permanent line-up. This first album was exceptionally well received by critics and the public, mixing some of the Grunge of the past with explosive Power-pop. In 1997 they released their second album, The colour and the shape, which followed the line of its predecessor in terms of style and hits.
At the end of 2004, after the endless lawsuits between the survivors of Nirvana (Novoselic, Grohl, Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, and the record company that owned the rights to the songs), With the lights out was released, an album with sixty-eight unreleased tracks, between rehearsals and home recordings of the group, which placed Nirvana again in the first pages of the music press around the world.
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