Superunknown

The band started work about two months after finishing the 1992 Lollapalooza tour. Each member wrote alone and brought demos in for the others to work on. Chris Cornell has said they allowed each other more freedom than on earlier records, and Kim Thayil observed that while the writing took as long as before, far more time went into the recording itself. This is also where they changed producer after two albums with Terry Date. The man they settled on, Michael Beinhorn, had no trademark sound of his own to impose on them. The sessions ran from July to September 1993 at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle — as Cornell put it, the city finally had a decent studio, so the choice made itself. The grunge and alternative metal of the earlier records is still underneath, with hard rock, heavy metal and psychedelia worked into it. The album entered the Billboard 200 at number one and sold 310,000 copies in its first week, and topped the charts in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. "Spoonman" and "Black Hole Sun" both won Grammy Awards. The running order here is the fifteen-track American original; international pressings add "She Likes Surprises".