Superunknown; Soundgarden, A&M; 1994

What does it take for an album to be declared a classic within a decade-and-a-half of its release? Let’s see: over 10 brilliant songs with hooks that are part of an alt-rocker generation’s psyche; a sound that marries heaviness with psychedelia in one of the most poignant manners possible — and a band that broke up at the height of its worldwide success.
Soundgarden’s Superunknown was out in a year that saw, among others, massive albums from the Stone Temple Pilots (Purple), The Prodigy (Music For The Jilted Generation), Alice In Chains (Jar Of Flies), Greenday (Dookie), Toad The Wet Sprocket (Dulcinea), the Dave Matthews Band (Under The Table & Dreaming) and Blues Traveler (Four). Nonetheless, the record — Soundgarden’s fourth studio cut — went on to become one of the best-selling albums of 1994; going platinum five times over in America and notching up two Grammy Awards in 1995. Black Hole Sun won for Best Hard Rock Performance, while Spoonman scooped up the surprise statuette for Best Metal Performance.
The accolades, though, are not enough pointers to a deeply emotional record. With lyrical themes that are an entry point to the dark realms of suicide, depression and substance abuse — perils of a band finding fame, according to some interpretations — Superunknown related stories of alienation and despair, talking of the world’s end and etching protagonists on the brink of the social circle. While despair at that state of things is relentless, on Superunknown, the band gladly finds a meeting point between its words and its layered, complex instrumentation — the latter far more mature and technically solid than its usual “grunge” peers — to finally celebrate the music it creates.
Superunknown doesn’t open: it leaps at you with Let Me Drown, buckles up with My Wave and releases the tension with the brooding junkie-journal Fell On Black Days.

In spite of its subjects and a sound that oscillates between hyper-paranoid odd-time and brooding, Superunknown possessed a surprisingly healthy strand of hope underlying its sledgehammer sound, the real subject of classics like Fell On Black Days and Black Hole Sun.
Chris Cornell may have gone on to form Audioslave and Matt Cameron may have bucked up with friends in Pearl Jam, the world still needs the band named after a Seattle sculpture. There aren’t too many out there.

Published in t2, The Telegraph, sometime in 2008