Nevermind

Recorded at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys with Butch Vig producing, on a budget of $65,000. The band had cut eight songs with Vig at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, in April 1990, and only Polly, with Chad Channing's cymbal crashes, was carried over to this album. Vig and the band were unhappy with the first mixes, and Cobain chose Andy Wallace, who had co-produced Slayer's Seasons in the Abyss, to mix the record. Howie Weinberg mastered it on 2 August 1991. The hidden track Endless, Nameless was left off the first pressings by mistake until Cobain phoned Weinberg to demand a fix.

The tentative title was Sheep. He later suggested Nevermind, which he liked as a metaphor for his attitude to life and because it was grammatically incorrect. The cover shows four-month-old Spencer Elden swimming toward a dollar bill on a fishhook. Kirk Weddle took the photograph, working from an idea Cobain had after watching a television programme on water births. The back cover has a rubber monkey in front of a Cobain collage. Cobain said afterward that he was embarrassed by the finished album, while Vig said in 2011 that the band loved it when it was finished.

It came out on 24 September 1991. The first US shipment was 46,251 copies and Geffen hoped for about 250,000. It entered the Billboard 200 at 144, and on 11 January 1992 it became Nirvana's first number one, replacing Michael Jackson's Dangerous. Geffen's president Ed Rosenblatt told the New York Times that it was one of those get out of the way and duck records. The RIAA certified it Diamond in March 1999 and 13 times platinum in 2024, and it has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.

Karen Schoemer of the New York Times was positive, Everett True of Melody Maker wrote that the band had proved the magazine right, and Rolling Stone gave it three stars out of five. The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll voted it best album of 1991, and NME ranked it first among the year's records. Pitchfork's Jess Harvell called it an unrepeatable object in 2011. Rolling Stone placed it 17th on its list of the 500 greatest albums in 2003 and sixth in 2020 and 2023, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. A 30th anniversary edition in 2021 added 70 previously unreleased live tracks.