Nevermind

On September 24, 1991, Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson's Dangerous off the top of the Billboard 200. Nobody saw it coming, least of all Nirvana. The band had a budget of $65,000, they were living in a chaotic apartment complex near the studio in Van Nuys, and their label was expecting to sell maybe 250,000 copies. They sold 30 million. Rock music was never the same afterward.

Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and newly recruited drummer Dave Grohl recorded the album in under a month at Sound City Studios in California, working sessions that stretched to midnight most nights. Producer Butch Vig had first heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on a boombox cassette Cobain mailed him, barely audible through the hiss, and still knew immediately it was extraordinary. When Vig pushed Cobain to double-track his vocals, Cobain resisted until Vig told him John Lennon did it. That was the end of the argument.

The album arrived at a moment when an entire generation of young people had been completely ignored by mainstream radio, and it spoke directly to them. Cobain famously hated how polished the final mix sounded, calling it closer to a Motley Crue record than a punk record. He was wrong to be embarrassed. That tension between raw energy and radio-ready production is exactly why it worked, and why "Teen Spirit," "Come as You Are," "Lithium," and "In Bloom" still hit as hard today as they did the morning they changed everything.