Essential Nirvana: Their 30 greatest songs, ranked

The last song Nirvana completed, “You Know You’re Right” doesn’t provide a tantalizing hint at what might have been. Rather, it serves as an epilogue, a reiteration of the band’s major themes, fitting neatly into the loud-soft-loud template the group adapted from Pixies. It offers no surprises save this: an unreleased Nirvana song that is no throwaway, it’s gnarled, potent and alive, a testament to the group’s rare powers.

Opening with a low, primordial rumble, “Blew” is as ominous as early Nirvana ever got; it’s all looming storm clouds and bad vibes. Some of the menace derives from an accident where the band wound up recording the track one step lower than planned, giving the song a queasy, unsettled grumble. “Blew” never fully shakes those doomy doldrums; even when Kurt Cobain leans into his scream, he seems constrained, giving the sense that “Blew” is being swallowed by its own murk.

A relative obscurity from David Bowie when Nirvana covered it for their MTV Unplugged special, some 23 years after its original release, “The Man Who Sold The World” is transformed into a monumental sigh in this subdued rendition. There’s not so much focus on sci-fi existentialism at the heart of Bowie’s original as there is an emphasis on a sense of resignation: in Nirvana’s hands, it’s not an impish provocation, it’s a song of bemused regret.

Driven by a churning riff that seems stuck in perpetual motion, “School” isn’t much more than a sketch but it’s a vivid one all the same. The guttural grind suggests being stuck in a place not of your choosing. Kurt Cobain murmurs “you’re in high school again” over the bridge, underscoring the dread that descends on the verse: this is a waking nightmare with no release.

Recorded in 1992—at the chasm between Nevermind and In Utero—“Oh, The Guilt” was Nirvana’s contribution to a split single with the Jesus Lizard. The trio collaborated with Steve Albini, the engineer who also recorded Jesus Lizard’s “Puss” on this seven-inch. In a sense, this song provides a tantalizing glimpse of what would arrive with In Utero: it has the melodic force of Nevermind, the scintillating sound of In Utero, all tied together by a snarling Kurt Cobain who seems intent on inflicting psychic wounds, largely on himself.

The apotheosis of the self-lacerating grunge on Bleach, “Negative Creep” finds Kurt Cobain spitting out vitriol aimed squarely at himself. Growling and twisting his lyrics so they no longer resemble recognizable words, Cobain sounds unhinged, as if he’s barely hanging onto the perception of reality; when he screams before the bridge, it’s not catharsis, it’s the wail of being trapped in a situation with no escape route.

Kurt Cobain started writing “Dumb” in the aftermath of Bleach and the song certainly has connective tissue to “About A Girl.” Like that early masterwork, “Dumb” floats to a considered minor key melody that somehow skirts the edge of sadness; it plays not like sorrow but like a long exhaled sigh. Nirvana completed “Dumb” for In Utero, adding a cello by Kera Schaley, a Chicago friend of Steve Albini. Schaley’s part is understated and crucial, adding depth and texture to a stark, unguarded Cobain lyric.

Riffing upon the story of Frances Farmer, an actress of the 1930s and 1940s whose career was derailed after a series of hospitalizations at psychiatric institutions, Kurt Cobain finds a vehicle for his own discomfort with celebrity and commercial art. Thanks to Steve Albini’s muscular monochrome, “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle” doesn’t sound especially commercial, particularly with squalls of feedback as punctuation. What gives the track considerable emotional resonance is how Cobain doesn’t lean into the extremes of his voice: he sounds weary, almost resigned, when he sings about missing “the comfort of being sad,” vocal phrasing that appealingly counters Nirvana’s roar.

An unusually lithe song from Nirvana, “Come As You Are” simmers on a percolating riff that vaguely resembles Killing Joke’s “Eighties” but is softer and sadder than that art-punk classic. Despite the escalation of volume on the bridge, velocity and force isn’t the point of Nirvana’s song: its power lies in its shimmer, how the guitars provide an unsteady center for Kurt Cobain’s litany of cliches that slowly get mussied up with mud and bleach, elements that add a sense of danger to the song’s reassurances.

An unnerving first-person character sketch of a rapist, “Polly” served as a stark counterpoint to the fury of Nevermind: its stillness was spookier than the noise that surrounded it. Nirvana had “Polly” in their pocket since the days of Bleach—they never recorded an electric version of it, known as “New Wave Polly” on Incesticide—but the version they made with Butch Vig is distinguished by the flattened thunk of an acoustic guitar with dead strings: its muffled percussive traits accentuates the weariness of the lyric and Kurt Cobain’s delivery, the tiredness making the vivid snapshots of an abduction and imprisonment especially eerie.

Released as “Verse Chorus Verse” on No Alternative, the alt-rock charity album for the Red Hot Organization, this song was later re-titled “Sappy” so it wouldn’t be confused with an older Kurt Cobain song also called “Verse Chorus Verse.” No matter its title, it’s a stark, vivid song whose loping melodic cadence cuts against the claustrophobic lyric. Images of imprisonment pop through the hooks, sounding all the more ominous when delivered with a sharpened melodic hook. Cobain returned to “Sappy” often after writing it in the late 1980s, coming close to including it on In Utero before shuffling it off to No Alternative where it existed in an exquisite captivity of its own: it was both part of In Utero and on an island, a song too misshapenly beautiful to easily belong anywhere.

Based on Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume—a story about an orphan blessed with a keen sense of smell and no aroma of his own, a combination that leads him to murder victims to create fragrances based on their essence—“Scentless Apprentice” bludgeons listeners into submission. Dave Grohl’s drumming has never sounded more like rolling thunder, Kurt Cobain’s web of guitars melt into a singular weapon, and Krist Novoselic’s bass provides ballast. Arriving after the teasing “Serve The Servants” on In Utero, its positioning on the album feels designed to alienate any fair-weather travelers, yet on its own it stands as a singularly powerful piece of rock and roll.

Krist Novoselic can be heard mocking the Youngbloods’ hippie era hit “Get Together” at the start of “Territorial Pissings,” the purest dose of cynical rage on Nevermind. The opening salvo seems like a throwaway joke but “Get Together” was omnipresent on oldies radio in the early 1990s, so having the piss taken out of it before the melody is steamrolled by Nirvana at full throttle suggested a generational change: the hippies were finally being usurped by punks, a full 15 years after the style first surfaced.

Slyly positioned as the opening cut on In Utero, Nirvana’s sequel to their convention-shattering blockbuster Nevermind, “Serve The Servants” sallies forth on dissonance that resolves with one of Kurt Cobain’s most famous couplets: “Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old.” Neither Cobain nor Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl sound bored here: Cobain’s lyrics crackle with wit and the dense chords are given a heavy, muscular underpinning that pummels the listener in a way the slick contours of Nevermind consciously avoided.

Kicking around since the early days of Nevermind—it was unveiled onstage in April 1991, at the same Seattle show where Nirvana premiered “Smells Like Teen Spirit”— “Pennyroyal Tea” remained a thorn in Kurt Cobain’s side, a song he was convinced that he never got quite right. It and “Heart-Shaped Box” were one of three In Utero songs to be given a remix from Scott Litt with designs of releasing it as a single, suggesting an unease with the final product—a suspicion confirmed by Cobain telling David Fricke that the band even thought they should re-record it, because he knew it was a “hit single.” A song about an abortifacient and depression doesn’t seem like a sure-fire smash but “Pennyroyal Tea” creates its own languid undertow, one where the prettiness of the melody cuts against the heaviness of the lyric and execution. It’s not enough to give the song shades of light but it does create compelling tension.

One of the punchier pop songs on Nevermind, “Drain You” bears faint traces of power pop and the Replacements in how it melds an active melody with a sardonic sensibility. What it shares with power pop is a melody so bold and memorable it seems like a sure fire smash, but when the song was floated as a potential sequel to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at alternative radio, it didn’t catch fire. In a way, that only adds to its appeal: its curdled romance and sweet hooks are the thing of cult legend.

Hookier than much of Bleach, “Been A Son” also finds Kurt Cobain diving headfirst into gender politics, writing an ode to a girl whose parents would’ve known how to raise her if she had been a boy. Cobain’s lyrics are deftly drawn and efficient, given force by an unabashed pop melody that ranks among his best tunes.

“Breed” is nothing but an onslaught of noise and rhythm, the only song on Nevermind where Kurt Cobain is swallowed whole by the unholy racket of Nirvana. The elastic riff—played by both Cobain and Krist Novoselic but the bassist is the driving voice—gets grounded by Dave Grohl who plays fast and steady, allowing for the hurricane to swell around him. Where Nevermind is filled with contradictions and nuance, that’s not the case here: “Breed” is simply pure adrenaline.

Released as the B-side of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Even In His Youth” marked the first session where Nirvana was anchored by Dave Grohl, the drummer who joined the band late in 1990. Grohl helps give “Even In His Youth” its locomotive propulsion, pushing Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic to bludgeon its essential riff. The collective force gives Cobain’s self-loathing a particularly vicious edge.

A stark, spooky coda to the vivid hooks that fuel so much of Nevermind, “Something In The Way” finds Kurt Cobain sketching a portrait of living in a tarp under the bridge. Whether the lyric is strictly autobiographical is almost irrelevant: Cobain conveys the profound loneliness of a vagabond, an aimless lifestyle grounded by the smallest semblance of reality. The sadness is compounded by the song’s minor key dirge accentuated by a mournful cello: those grace notes lend empathy without resolving the ache at the song’s center.

While the chorus lyric of a fan who sings along with Nirvana without knowing what the words mean might suit the cynicism of In Utero, “In Bloom” needed to be part of Nevermind: its oversized melody is calling out for the candied production of Butch Vig, a master of making volume seem vibrant and colorful. Vig cycles through a number of guitar tones on his way to building a wall of sound, a tactic that emphasizes Nirvana’s debt to power poppers, from Cheap Trick through to the Smithereens.

An old folk song also known as “In The Pines,” “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” had been kicking around the Seattle scene in the 1980s and 1990s. The 1944 version by Lead Belly held particular sway with Kurt Cobain and Mark Lanegan: the Nirvana guitarist played on the Screaming Trees vocalist’s 1990 version. A few years later, Cobain chose to end Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged appearance with a stately, chilling version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” Taking the initial verses with the solemnity of a dirge, Nirvana builds to a shivering crescendo where Cobain wails the final verse as if he was summoning dormant ghosts. It’s a performance that does what great folk music should do: it’s part of a lineage yet utterly distinctive on its own merits.

Opening with a woozy single-note riff, “Heart-Shaped Box” closes with an avalanche of noise that leaves a single guitar feeding back ever so slightly. Those sounds bookend a love song so gnarled it sometimes seems as if it’s a paean to pain: the pledges of devotion are always framed as sacrifice, even as destruction. As captured by Steve Albini, Nirvana accentuates all these uneasy emotions: their sudden sonic explosions sound particularly violent, as does Kurt Cobain’s larynx-shredding scream.

Something of a one-off, “Sliver” was recorded by Nirvana in the space between Bleach and Nevermind, a time when they had yet to connect with drummer Dave Grohl or producer Butch Vig. Here, they’re still in Jack Endino’s studio, this time supported by Dan Peters, the drummer for Mudhoney, who helps give the bubblegum bounce of “Sliver” an appealing primitive thump. Without the heavier attack, Kurt Cobain’s tale of a kid who doesn’t want to stay at his grandparents’ house could’ve drifted toward twee, but the rhythmic might gives the song a playfulness that’s irresistible.

“Dive” is where Nevermind starts to come into view. Released less than a year after Bleach, “Dive” is simultaneously heavier and hookier than anything on Nirvana’s debut, a combination expertly articulated by producer Butch Vig in his first released collaboration with the band. The thick, roiling guitars roll like a tidal wave, a surging sound that’s aggressive and transcendent: where so much of Nirvana’s music seems like a necessary catharsis, this is galvanizing.

Even more so than “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Lithium” is an expert example of Nirvana’s mastery of tension, alternating between a slow creeping verse and volcanic chorus. The gap between the two extremes is heightened by Kurt Cobain’s clever wordplay on the verse and the utter absence of lyrics on the chorus: it’s as if he’s battling his ego and id over the course of the song. Even when there are no words, the melody is alive, a series of intertwined hooks that almost seem engaged in competition.

One of the few songs credited as a co-write between Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, “Aneurysm” does indeed sound like the work of a collective organism that expands and contracts on instinct. Swinging between chaos and a bone-deep heavy groove, “Aneurysm” has no deep meaning apart from its sheer force, a sound that offers transcendence through its submersion in grime.

The only song on Bleach not to be decorated with some measure of distortion of noise, “About A Girl” is driven by one of Kurt Cobain’s prettiest melodies—a nimble, sweet line that dances around minor key chords without quite seeming melancholy. Make no mistake: it’s a plaintive message of love, a song where the narrator is pining for a possibly unrequited love, but there’s a tenderness in the song and performance—a quality present in the version on Bleach but stronger on the acoustic rendition on MTV Unplugged in New York—that gives it a warmth that skirts the edges of sadness.

A song so quiet that it almost plays as a hymn, “All Apologies” doesn’t quite settle into a comfortable resolution. Every time Kurt Cobain finds some measure of comfort, he pulls out the rug slightly: after finding his nest of salt, he claims “everything is my fault,” he winds up rhyming “married” with “buried,” suggesting the relationship is a prison. These quivers of anxiety keep the circular melody from seeming like a mantra, a quality that gives “All Apologies” an enduring mystery.

One of the few singles in rock history that provides a clear pivot point, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” quickly turned into a cliche through its overexposure and imitation, two things that should not be held against the song: it may have generated that reaction but the thing itself is a wonder. Despite its reputation, it isn’t a flurry of angst: maybe Kurt Cobain’s yowl conveys unease but his lyrics are elliptical, even obtuse, a collection of images that gain strength when married to a spectral melody and anchored by measured explosions of noise. The control and tension are not only the engine driving the song, they’re the reason why it retains power after years of repetition.