Dirt

Dirt was the last album with all four original members. Dave Jerden, who had produced Facelift, produced it, and Would? had been recorded earlier by Rick Parashar for the Singles soundtrack. Sessions ran from April to July 1992 and began as the Los Angeles riots broke out. The band, with Slayer's Tom Araya in tow, went to Joshua Tree for four or five days before returning to the studio. Jerden built the guitar tone by blending three amplifiers: a Bogner Fish preamp for the low end, a Bogner Ecstasy for the mids and a Rockman headphone amp for the highs.

Staley called the album semi-conceptual. Cantrell told RIP in 1993 that the five songs from Junkhead to Angry Chair sit together on the second side for a reason, because they tell a story that starts with a young, naive attitude and grows up. Staley wrote Hate to Feel and Angry Chair himself and played guitar on both. Tom Araya sings on the 43-second Iron Gland.

The cover shows a nude woman half-buried in a cracked desert. Photographer Rocky Schenck and art director Mary Maurer made it, using a desert Schenck built in his Hollywood studio from foam core and clay, and the model was Mariah O'Brien. It was the band's idea, and Schenck said the woman could be either dead or alive. Dirt reached number six on the Billboard 200, charted for 102 weeks and is certified five times platinum in the United States. In 2022 the 30th anniversary reissue took it back into the top ten at number nine. Pitchfork called it one of the most unremittingly bleak albums ever released by a major label, and AllMusic's Steve Huey said it was the closest the band came to a flat-out masterpiece.