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The 15 Best Nirvana Songs

Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl were prolific enough to produce some of the greatest rock songs ever put to tape.

The 15 Greatest Nirvana Songs
Photo: Sub Pop

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s tragic death via a self-inflicted gunshot wound. As if that weren’t a stark enough reminder of our fragile mortality, the band’s debut album, Bleach, will turn 30 this June. Of course, the massive success of Nirvana’s 1991 follow-up, Nevermind, would help change the course of rock history. The band’s songs, the vast majority of which were penned solely by Cobain, fused pop, punk, and heavy metal into raw yet relatively digestible scraps of visceral rock poetry that struck just the right balance of accessible and challenging, introducing “alternative rock” to the masses, influencing an entire generation of musicians and fans, and—for better or worse—christening a new subgenre: grunge. Though Nirvana only lasted for seven years and three studio albums, Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl were prolific enough to produce some of the greatest rock songs ever put to tape. Sal Cinquemani

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on April 5, 2014. Listen to our entire Nirvana playlist on Spotify.


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15. “Been a Son”

The first of many collections of scraps tossed out to hungry fans, Insecticide at least revealed a few new sides of the band, ranging from blistering punk assaults to strange slices of jagged power pop. “Been a Son” proves one of the standouts of these early recordings, a zippy, straightforward ditty that retains only a scant undercurrent of sludge, only hinting at the psychic trauma that other songs made much more evident. Jesse Cataldo


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqseYiGA0us

14. “Rape Me”

Emblematic of the band’s reaction to accusations that they “sold out” for signing with a major label and softening their early punk sound, the opening guitar lick of “Rape Me” pointedly and playfully evokes “Smells Like Teen Spirit” before the track devolves into a crushingly blunt treatise on sexual assault that conveniently, if unintentionally, doubles as a taunt to the media to take their best shot. Cinquemani

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f87OQkzWQik

13. “Sliver”

Rock’s inherently primal qualities have always been obvious, but few songs have approached them as directly as this one, a charging anthem that boils down to a melancholy tale of a little boy crying for his mother. Originally released by Sub Pop as a non-album single, it’s another sustained tantrum of a track, a roar disguising a whimper, highlighting the tormented whelp at the center of all that seething rage. Cataldo


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12. “In Bloom”

Pitted with a stream of pithy, sardonic koans that go almost unnoticed under all the noise, “In Bloom” imagines a micro-problem (ignorant meddlers of the Seattle scene) that quickly exploded into a macro one, leaving an acidic song retroactively aimed at the huge contingent of fans prizing the band for their muscular qualities, while ignoring the pained sensitivity which produced that intensity. If more people had been listening, maybe we could have avoided the long downward spiral of influence that eventually led to Puddle of Mudd. Cataldo


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11. “On a Plain”

Few things are more selfish, or illogical, than addiction, and the messy, self-focused tenor of Nirvana’s songs proves the perfect platform to engage that topic. The exacting honesty of tracks like “On a Plain” ended up as one of the band’s biggest cultural coups, pushing the focus of mainstream rock not only from glam fakery to “genuine” emotion, but from a fixation on surfaces and objects to the intrinsic horrors of being human, the gross weakness of our bodies and the yawning emptiness of discontent. Cataldo

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10. “You Know You’re Right”

What’s most striking about “You Know You’re Right,” the last known Nirvana song, is that it could have been recorded in 2002, the year it was finally released. All of the signature elements are present and accounted for (quiet verses, explosive choruses, self-deprecating lyrics), but the song’s slicker presentation edged the band ever so slightly in what could have been a promising new direction, even if Cobain’s lyrics and laconic delivery seemed to hint that he was prepared to “crawl away for good.” Cinquemani


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb71GyLkGYc

9. “Pennyroyal Tea”

Slotted as the band’s next single in the spring of 1994, “Pennyroyal Tea” was pulled from release following Cobain’s death for reasons that are plainly obvious. Named after an herbal abortive and referencing the chronic stomach pain that’s credited for the singer’s drug abuse, the song finds Cobain pining for a “Leonard Cohen afterworld” where he can “sigh eternally.” To celebrate the 20th anniversary of its planned release, the single, including the original B-side “I Hate Myself and Want to Die,” is set to be re-issued as a limited 7” on April 19th. Cinquemani


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj3bCXViNNM

8. “Dumb”

Nirvana’s third and final studio album, In Utero, challenged audiences with a more abrasive sound while at the same time refining the band’s pop bona fides. The latter quality is perhaps best exemplified by “Dumb,” which showed a gentler and, however sarcastic, more optimistic side of Cobain. The song is topped off with some unexpected vocal harmonies and a yawning cello, the band’s folky embellishment of choice. Cinquemani


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpMt_YqVbhw

7. “About a Girl”

An odd idyll of Beatles-inspired pop among Bleach’s sturm-and-drang dissonance, “About a Girl” is also the best song on the album, revealing Cobain’s intuitive ability to cloak hooks amid otherwise difficult music. Opening their final recorded session on MTV Unplugged, it also serves as a painful reminder of what the band might have sounded like in a post-grunge era. Cataldo


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6. “Heart-Shaped Box”

Supposedly written about the utter injustice of kids suffering from cancer, “Heart-Shaped Box” ultimately seems as impossible to classify as most Nirvana songs, setting out a series of perverse images while fully embracing the outlines of a new aesthetic, as structurally polished and professional as anything on Nevermind, but returning to the snotty, petulant punk ferocity of Bleach. Cataldo

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5. “Come As You Are”

Both a statement of unconditional friendship and a veiled declaration of hostility, “Come As You Are” thrives off that conflicted confusion. Progressing from a rare moment of pure ambience, that opening guitar line, like a reflection shimmering in water, gradually gets submerged under more and more distortion and noise, culminating with a disruptive solo, which breaks the entire song open, leaving everything upended in disarray. Cataldo


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDyvClUsCJU

4. “Something in the Way”

Questionably tuned acoustic guitar and two identical verses give Nevermind’s closing track an unfinished, demo quality, but Cobain’s double-tracked vocals and Kirk Channing’s cello make it the album’s most accessible offering. Despite a silly lyric or two (“It’s okay to eat fish/’Cause they don’t have any feelings”), the song possesses a stark beauty and despondency in its mumbled ruminations of a homeless man. Cinquemani

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3. “Lithium”

Perhaps more than any other song, “Lithium” typifies the divisions that define Nirvana—the innate tension between quiet and loud, pop and noise, weakness and fury, pleasure and pain, belief and doubt—with a chorus that arches up from the muck, stretching for transcendence, but unable to escape the nagging distress that keeps all their music fixedly earthbound. Cataldo


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2. “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Though they tried, Nirvana was never able to escape their quintessential anthem of Gen-X ennui, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Blame Kurt. He set out to write “the ultimate pop song,” and while he didn’t quite succeed at that lofty goal, he and his bandmates did invent the quintessential alt-rock template for the ’90s and beyond, drawing on the Pixies’ patented juxtaposition of hard and soft and an indelible, double-tracked riff that’s hard to imagine never existed before (don’t say it sounds like Boston). Cinquemani

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1. “All Apologies”

Krist Novoselic called “All Apologies” a “gateway” to In Utero’s harder, less pop-friendly material. Even before the iconic MTV Unplugged version, the song hinted at the band’s future beyond grunge. But it was also a gateway into the soul of a rock god who didn’t believe he was worthy of his seat, a fitting swan song and, perhaps, the saddest—and least warranted—mea culpa of all time. Cinquemani

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