“Heart-Shaped Box” was considered one of Nirvana’s greatest hits of their heyday, and many years later it continues to be one of many band’s hottest songs. The 1993 single simply joined the Spotify Billions Membership by surpassing one billion streams on the platform. It’s Nirvana’s third observe to cross that threshold following “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come As You Are.”
Upon its launch in 1993, “Heart-Shaped Box” was the lead single from Nirvana’s third album, In Utero. The album was the follow-up to the trio’s game-changing 1991 major-label debut Nevermind, which made Nirvana probably the most widespread and influential musical acts in America and did greater than another album to spark an alternate rock explosion throughout the music trade.
Recorded at Minnesota’s Pachyderm Studios with recording engineer Steve Albini, In Utero discovered the Nirvana frontman and his bandmates leaning into their extra aggressive and esoteric influences, seemingly on the expense of business enchantment. However a big portion of the Nevermind viewers flocked to In Utero anyway, with the album attaining Platinum standing by yr’s finish and spinning off a number of hit singles. “Heart-Shaped Box” and its follow-up single “All Apologies” each grew to become staples of MTV and various rock radio, they usually each climbed to the highest of Billboard’s Fashionable Rock chart.
Cobain gave a number of tales about the subject material of “Heart-Shaped Box,” resembling telling Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad it was about kids with terminal most cancers. Such miserable subject material, paired with ugly riffs and cruel manufacturing, doesn’t sound just like the components for a chart-topping hit. However as Stereogum put it in a retrospective years later, “That’s the magic of Nirvana. Whether or not they meant to do it, they took lots of heavy, heady ideas and presented them in ways that sounded great on the radio.”
Purchase Nirvana’s In Utero on vinyl now.
