In honor of its 30th anniversary, Nirvana’s seminal album In Utero has received a massive reissue. The new version features 53 previously unreleased tracks, featured in three Super Deluxe editions.
Configurations include a limited-edition 8LP Super Deluxe box set, 5CD Super Deluxe box set, 1 LP + 10” edition, 2CD Deluxe edition, and a Digital Super Deluxe edition. Additionally, In Utero’s original twelve songs, along with five bonus tracks and B-sides, have been newly remastered from the original analog master stereo tapes by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Services—who assisted producer Steve Albini as the only other engineer at the original sessions.
The physical Super Deluxe Edition box sets also boast a removable front-cover acrylic panel with the album’s iconic Angel; a 48-page hardcover book with unreleased photos; a 20-page newly designed fanzine; a Los Angeles tour poster lithograph by hot rod artist Coop; replicas of the 1993 record store promo Angel mobile, three gig fliers, two ticket stubs for Los Angeles and Seattle, an All-Access tour laminate, and four cloth sticky tour backstage passes: Press, Photo, After Show, and Local Crew.
With its 1991 predecessor Nevermind having sold some 30 million copies and causing a seismic cultural shift, In Utero was essentially the first record Nirvana would make with any expectations from the public. So from the melodic opening of “Serve The Servants” through the bittersweet closing strains of “All Apologies,” In Utero was the sound of the most incredible yet conflicted musical force of the era at the peak of its powers coming to terms with a generational spokes-band mantle they’d never seen coming—and ultimately surmounting these struggles to make the record they needed to make.
Nirvana recorded In Utero over the course of six days in February 1993 at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, MN with Albini. In a retrospective review, Pitchfork rated it a rare perfect score of “10.0” and wrote, “In Utero is the sort of painful shock that, paradoxically, reinstills the empowering sensation of feeling alive.” Upon its arrival back in 1993, David Fricke wrote in Rolling Stone, “In Utero is a lot of things—brilliant, corrosive, enraged and thoughtful, most of them all at once. But more than anything, it’s a triumph of the will.”
Originally released September 21, 1993, In Utero was Nirvana’s third and final studio album, its first No.1 debut on the Billboard 200 and has since been certified 6x platinum in the United States.
Buy or stream the 30th Anniversary Edition of In Utero.
