May, 2025

🎵 Back in 1991, Nevermind become an unexpected critical and commercial sensation.

Its raw guitars and rough, unapologetic sound captivated listeners, though most of us simply enjoyed it without appreciating its artistry.

Careful music analysis was left for other bands.

Now, more than 30 years later, I want to uncover a few special ingredients that made it truly unforgettable.

Please take a few minutes to listen to each excerpt below

Buried under distorted overdriven guitars, one song at the time, a music made of new innovative harmonic idioms emerges.

Power chords - mostly sounding as Major chords - in harmonic progressions outside any scale.

Hardly any minor chord and no fancy chords (7th, 2nd, 4th, 6th, 9th, dim, aug).

And it was like this for every song in Nevermind. Surely, other singers and bands, way before nirvana, had written songs using similar techniques, but those would have been a few tracks in otherwise standard rock albums.

In 1991, Kurt Cobain wrote an album with just major chords

And it's fascinating to think that Kurt Cobain was unaware of any musical composition's rule he was following, but just trusting his musical instict.