Dirt

Layne Staley checked out of a Portland rehab facility before recording began and went straight back to using heroin. During sessions at studios in Burbank and Seattle, he tried going cold turkey on his own, reading a Dean Koontz novel to keep himself occupied. It didn't last. Drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Starr were drinking heavily through the same period. Producer Dave Jerden, who had decided his job was to make the record and not to be Staley's friend, used sixteen tracks just for Staley's vocals, tripling them and processing them through delays with an effect he created specifically for that voice, an effect he later said he simply named "Layne Staley." Jerry Cantrell brought in a guitar amplifier he had bought at seventeen, one with heavier distortion than anything he had used before, for five of the album's key songs.

The resulting record is one of the heaviest and most sonically suffocating things in the rock canon. The riffs descend rather than climb. The harmonies between Staley and Cantrell are gorgeous in a way that makes the subject matter land harder, like something beautiful trapped in something dark. "Rooster," which Cantrell wrote about his father's experience in Vietnam, sits on the same album as "Angry Chair" and "Down in a Hole," two songs Staley wrote entirely himself about what addiction feels like from the inside. The album went to number six on the Billboard 200 without a conventional radio single, almost entirely on the weight of what it sounded like.

Staley died in his apartment in Seattle in 2002. He had been dead for two weeks before anyone found him. Dirt documents the beginning of the thing that killed him, and it sounds like it.