There is a moment about four minutes into “Black Hole Sun” where the distortion opens up like a trapdoor in the floor, and you realize Chris Cornell has been standing over it the whole time.
Superunknown — and yes, I know the album is called Superunknown, not Soundgarden, whoever submitted this prompt — arrived in March of 1994, the same season Kurt Cobain died and the same season everything about guitar music felt like it was either catching fire or burning down. Soundgarden had been circling this record for years, sharpening their edges on Badmotorfinger, learning to be patient with themselves. By the time they got to London Bridge Studio in Seattle with producer Michael Beinhorn, they were ready to make something that didn’t need to explain itself.
The Room Where It Happened
Beinhorn had worked with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Hole, and he was known for pushing bands to the edges of their own comfort. What he found in Soundgarden was a band that was already uncomfortable — productively so. Matt Cameron is the quiet engine underneath all of it, playing in odd time signatures the way most drummers play in 4/4: like they were born there. His work on “Spoonman” and “My Wave” is the kind of drumming that makes you wonder why anyone bothers with loops.
Artis the Spoonman — Artis Leon Ivey Jr., the actual Seattle street performer — plays on “Spoonman.” Cornell had written the song about him years earlier. There’s something genuinely generous about that, about a band at the peak of its powers making room for the guy who inspired it.
Ben Shepherd’s bass is low and a little mean throughout, especially on the heavier stretches like “Mailman” and “Fresh Tendrils.” Kim Thayil’s guitar work here is not flashy. It is architectural. He builds rooms you can walk around inside.
Cornell
The voice is the thing. It was always the thing.
Cornell had a four-octave range, but the more interesting fact is what he did with the middle of it — the place where a lesser singer would coast. He didn’t coast. He leaned. “Like Suicide,” the closer, is eight minutes long and built around a true story about a bird that flew into his window and died. He turned that into something that sounds like grief for a thing you can’t name.
The record also carries a genuine darkness that 1994 seemed to demand. Songs like “The Day I Tried to Live” and “Fell on Black Days” aren’t dressed-up angst — they’re precise. Cornell had a gift for writing about depression without making it sound like a pose, which is rarer than it should be.
Brendan O’Brien mixed the album. His fingerprints are on a lot of the decade’s best-sounding records — the low end sits right, the guitars have mass without becoming mud, and Cornell’s voice sits forward without crowding everything else out. It sounds expensive in the way that well-spent time sounds expensive.
Superunknown moved nearly a million copies in its first week. It won two Grammys. It is one of the best-selling albums of the nineties, and also one of the ones that actually deserved to be.
Put it on loud enough that you feel it in your chest. That’s the correct volume.