When I think about music from the ’90s I have nothing but fond memories. Sure, there were a few goofy phases (factory-farmed boy-bands come to mind), but it’s difficult to deny the sheer number of genre-defining releases. Be it Nevermind or Houdini, there’s a legitimate masterpiece case to be made for any number of records. From metal to hip-hop to electronica to grunge*, the decade handed my generation an embarrassment of musical riches.
Which brings us to Soundgarden’s Superunknown. The 1994 release belongs to a very, very small group of records I’m still wrapping my head around. Thirty-some years in and I’m still isolating parts, hearing new things nad realizing that lyrics I was certain I understood as a teenager were actually about things I hadn’t gotten around to living yet.
It’s a rare thing for a band’s creative apex to coincide with their critical success, and yes, that’s precisely the case I’m making here. Sure, many Soundgarden fans will jump to Badmotorfinger, and rightfully so. (There’s probably a case to be made for 1996’s Down on the Upside as well). But despite its double platinum status, Badmotorfinger just so happened to drop October 1991, right as Nevermind was flattening everything in its path. For all their success, Soundgarden still felt like Seattle’s best-kept secret, especially when compared to their diamond-selling peers.
Like most fans, my point of entry was the video for “Outshined.” Bought the Badmotorfinger (what a title!) record and soon discovered a perfect fusion of everything I liked about music. It didn’t sound a million miles away from a lot of the ‘80s hair metal I was listening to at the time, but there was so much more depth. I could hear Sabbath and Zeppelin and it sounded so good (just like the latest Metallica album). I had discovered a new favorite band.
So when rumblings of a follow-up surfaced in the spring of 1994, I expected them to double down on the Badmotorfinger formula. I suspect most fans did. What we got instead was a sonic kaleidoscope of a record that was somehow of a piece with everything they’d done and yet sounded nothing like Ultramega OK, Louder Than Love, or Badmotorfinger.
Debuting at number one on the Billboard 200, Superunknown was the payoff Cornell and Co. had been working toward. The record spawned five singles: “Spoonman,” “The Day I Tried to Live,” “Black Hole Sun,” “My Wave,” and “Fell on Black Days.” Two Grammys and six-million sales later, Superunknown remains, by a comfortable margin, the peak of Soundgarden’s success.
None of which, of course, has anything to do with why it’s so freaking great. Superunknown is the sound of four guys giving each other room. Cornell said afterward that the band allowed one another more freedom here than on anything previous, and Thayil noted they spent considerably more time on the recording itself. I think you can hear both.
The album uses every second of its seventy-minutes-plus runtime, stretching the band’s sound in every direction. Cornell (who was deep-diving Sylvia Plath for lyrical inspiration) delivers a career defining vocal performance here. Not the highest notes or the loudest moments, mind you, but there’s some real soul-bearing stuff on this album, and a singer who has figured out that restraint is a powerful tool.
This is also a Matt Cameron record. His ability to play something enormously complicated in a way that instantly makes sense is on full display. Half these arrangements are structurally insane, but nobody’s going to accuse this of being a prog album. The drum sounds alone are worth the price of admission.
Same goes for Shepherd. On a record this layered, with this many competing parts, he’s frequently the only thing keeping the structure legible.
And for his part, Thayil managed to give this hodge-podge of material an identifiable through-line. Be it the radio-ready anthems (“Black Hole Sun,” “Fell On Black Days”) or the sheer brutality of something like “Mailman,” it’s his unmistakable tone and playing that makes the band’s most eclectic batch of songs to date identifiable as Soundgarden.
There’s also something to be said about the tension. The same friction that would go on to produce Down on the Upside would eventually drive them apart in April 1997. But on Superunknown, whatever was pulling in opposite directions got channeled straight into the material.
Speaking of which, now feels like a good place to drop a personal ranking, albeit, with a few caveats:
– I’m working from the standard fifteen-track running order, so no “She Likes Surprises” or any of the other umpteen b-sides.
– These are all essential in my book.
– I wouldn’t remove anything from the sequence
– The bottom is only the bottom because something has to be.
15. Half
With Ben Shepherd on lead vocals, this is an interlude at best. But as a table-setter for the epic album-closer (more on that in a bit), this two-minutes of middle-eastern-tinged madness is just perfect.
14. Kickstand
Ninety seconds of punk rock, and the fastest thing on the record by a mile. It’s just so short and brief that there isn’t much to say beyond that it exists to remind you the band can still floor it. It’s also the one track here that would fit comfortably on a Sub Pop single from 1988, which I mean as a compliment.
13. Superunknown
There’s a lot going on here. On top of one of the band’s denser mixes, Cornell turns in a crazy good vocal performance and probably the album’s most physically demanding. The solo section is a genuine highlight. There’s almost a mission-statement thing happening here, where the track essentially sums up the whole album in a five minute package.
12. Fresh Tendrils
Great song, great vocal, and a super interesting lyric on top of it. This is also the proggiest, most angular song on the album. All the layers and the parts and the way they refuse to line up the way you expect. By rights it should collapse under its own weight, but the reason it doesn’t is Matt Cameron. He’s holding the whole arrangement together. Also can’t say enough about the drum sounds on this record; this is easily one of my favorite recorded snare sounds ever, full stop.
11. Spoonman
Quite possibly the best use of a kitchen utensil in the history of recorded music. Come to think of it, it might be the only use of a kitchen utensil I can name, but still!
This was also the first thing I heard off the record, and I remember being genuinely excited. The song, the video, all of it took me by surprise, and in hindsight it was exactly the right choice to bridge the gap between Badmotorfinger and Superunknown. Anyone with good ears and a VHS copy of Singles had already heard that riff a couple of years earlier, tucked into the background of Cameron Crowe’s soundtrack before it ever became a single.
10. My Wave
Yet another super weird tuning (E-E-B-B-B-B) that made jamming along next to impossible, “My Wave” is the song that took the longest to grow on me. I’m not really sure what it was, because when I listen to it now, I’m struck by just how much groove the band injected into this one. And that outro is just so good. Yeah, I’m really not sure what my deal was.
9. Head Down
This is where that Eastern modality is most obvious, and it caught my ear from day one. Great falsetto vocal too, and I still can’t get enough of that descending lead-line that appears in the chorus.
8. Mailman
Where “My Wave” took a bit to grow on me, I was locked into “Mailman” from day one. This was (and remains) one of the heaviest riffs I’ve ever heard. It caught my ear immediately and I still consider this one of the band’s sludgiest moments. The chorus is a great example of just how good Cornell was dropping something instantly memorable over an otherwise heady, hard-to-follow riff.
7. The Day I Tried to Live
A great example of a single repeating riff that provides a distinct verse and chorus courtesy of the beyond brilliant vocal melodies. The band takes a simple, bare-bones arrangement and turns it into this epic anthem thanks in no small part to one of the most powerful choruses in their catalog.
6. Black Hole Sun
Here we go, genuinely one of the great pop songs of the decade. And here’s the part I love most, which almost nobody talks about: Kim Thayil somehow manages to drop the most atonal, craziest, shreddiest solo of the entire album into the middle of the band’s most Beatles-esque top-40 song.
On paper it probably shouldn’t work, but it’s exactly what makes so much more than your typical mid-tempo ballad. It’s also so Soundgarden.
I’ve also heard it roughly nine thousand times in gyms and grocery stores and everywhere in between, and unlike everything above it, familiarity has maybe/sorta/kinda cost it something. Cool song, cool lyric, incredible video, incredible solo. Of the singles pulled off this record, it’s just the one I have in which I have the least left to discover.
5. Fell on Black Days
Probably the most conventional song on the album, though we’re kind of grading on a curve here. The best part here is the band settles into a mid-tempo groove and, save for super tasty lead section, stays the course. The result is easily my favorite single from the album.
By this point, Cornell had emerged as the primary songwriter, and “Fell on Black Days” offers a really good glimpse into Cornell’s eventual solo work (mileage may vary on that front). For my money, this is a shining example of ‘less is more.’
4. Let Me Drown
Soundgarden always had strong album openers, and this one kicks the door in with zero preamble and does the single hardest job on the record: convincing you in about fifteen seconds that the band that made Badmotorfinger is still in the building, right before spending the next seventy minutes complicating that idea. Easily one of the best album-openers I’ve ever heard from anyone.
3. Limo Wreck
Another crazy time-signature that only makes sense if you avoid trying to nod along. This one also gets my vote for the best vocal performance of Cornell’s career. Not the loudest or the highest, mind you, but definitely the one that best sums up all the many things he was capable of. He rides that thing from a near-whisper up to the top of his range and back down without ever once sounding like he’s showing you something. Nothing else in their catalog is unnerving in quite this way.
2. 4th of July
My vote for the heaviest thing on the record, and I mean that in ‘all’ the variations of the word. From the plodding tempo to Chris’ hypnotic vocals to that brilliantly understated solo, everything is working in perfect balance. I feel like if you could distill everything that makes Soundgarden who they are into a single song, it would probably sound a little something like this.
1. Like Suicide
Seven-plus minutes at the end of a seventy-minute album, and it earns every one of them. Chris was fond of telling the story that this song is literally about euthanizing a bird that had flown into a window and was unable to fly, but that always felt like a bit of a cover to me.
Regardless of the true meaning here, “She lived like a murder but she died just like suicide” is just brilliant. Talk about a lyric. Painfully linear in anyone else’s hands, but somehow, in the context of this song, with Chris Cornell singing, it’s one of those lines I still find myself thinking about.
Then there’s the entire second half, where the band comes in on Matt Cameron’s thunderous tom fills and that crazy double-tracked solo from Kim Thayil. It’s just stuff of magic. This is how you end an album. This is the band’s epic. And for me, it’s the point from which I measure everything else.
Well, there you have it. As these things go, this is all etched in sand, and I’m probably going to want to reorder this whole list tomorrow. Bottom line, these songs belong together, regardless of how you order them.
Following the release of Superunknown, the band kept moving in ways nobody could have scripted. Down on the Upside arrived in 1996 and debuted at number two. They broke up in April 1997, came back in 2010, and put out King Animal in 2012. Then the long silence, and the lawsuits, and finally the resolution.
In November 2025, Soundgarden went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted by Jim Carrey of all people. Hiro Yamamoto stood onstage with Thayil, Cameron, and Shepherd for the first time in thirty-six years. Toni Cornell sang “Fell on Black Days” for her father.
And there’s still one more chapter coming (or it’s already arrived, depending on when you’re reading this), which is more than most of us expected. And no matter what it sounds like, rest assured it will probably send me back to Superunknown all over again.
Thirty-plus years later, I’m still not done with this record.
*I loathe the word grunge. Always have. It was a marketing term dressed up as a genre, invented so record stores would know which bin to use and so magazines would have something to put on a cover, and it flattened a genuinely weird, genuinely regional scene into a haircut (sound familiar?). I always preferred alt-rock, which is admittedly its own kind of useless catch-all. Ben Shepherd has said more or less the same thing over the years, that it was just marketing, that they were a band from Seattle playing rock and roll. I’ll take his word over the bin label. But grunge is what everybody calls it, so whatevs.
Leave a Reply