Soundgarden Louder Than Love turns 35 this month, and it remains one of the most misread albums in the alternative rock canon: not a bid for mainstream acceptance, but a deliberately obtuse piece of work that confused almost everyone who heard it in 1989, and changed a few lives in the process.
Released on 5 September 1989, Louder Than Love was Soundgarden’s major-label debut, the band having quit SST Records to become the first band from their Seattle peer group to sign to A&M Records. That move alone generated suspicion in the underground. Then the record came out, and it managed to confuse everybody all over again.
Black Sabbath without the parts that suck
Formed in 1984 with the stated aim of being “Black Sabbath without the parts that suck,” Soundgarden had always had a polarising effect on the Seattle rock community. Their dirge-heavy, Sabbath/Stooges/Zeppelin-indebted sound left listeners unable to decide whether it was a lusty celebration of classic rock or a straight-faced piss-take. Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil, characteristically, never apologised and never explained.
It has since become fashionable to claim that Soundgarden Louder Than Love was the band edging toward rock’s mainstream, a view given apparent credibility by the decision to tour with Guns N’ Roses in 1991. That reading is revisionist. In the autumn of 1989, the mainstream was Pump, Dr. Feelgood, Skid Row and Sonic Temple. Louder Than Love sounded like none of those records. A full two years before what would be dubbed “The Year That Punk Broke,” the album was a particularly awkward and obtuse release even by the standards of the emerging alternative vanguard, which at that point included NIN, Faith No More, Dinosaur Jr., Jane’s Addiction and Sonic Youth.
The evidence is all over the record. Kim Thayil’s one-note drone guitar runs for a full two minutes through opener Ugly Truth. The lurching time signatures and tempo changes that destabilise Gun were written, Cornell said, about the occasional desire “to grab some rich broker and rip his head off.” Bassist Hiro Yamamoto’s I Awake opens with the line “Woke up depressed, I left for work, you have a good day, it’s not your fault” and proceeds to be exactly as uncomfortable as that implies.
Then there’s Big Dumb Sex, which Cornell described to Melody Maker in 1989 as “a parody of the sexual innuendos of disco records. Instead of beating about the bush, I decided to be bold, to actually come out and say, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna fuck’. I guess it was good to get it out of my system so that I’ll never write something like that again.” The song has, in the years since, provided at least one music journalist with a spectacularly ill-timed introduction to the record. No further details will be offered here.
Soundgarden Louder Than Love and the band’s shifting dynamic
The album marks the point at which Cornell began to assume the dominant creative role in Soundgarden. Where the songwriting credits on 1988’s Ultramega OK had been spread fairly evenly between Cornell, Thayil and Yamamoto, the second album weighted things considerably more toward Cornell. Tracks like Ugly Truth, Loud Love and Uncovered are the moments where that authority is most audible, cuts that shine through the surrounding sludge with a clarity that the earlier record rarely managed.
That shift in the internal balance had consequences. AllMusic notes that following the album’s fall 1989 release, Yamamoto left the band to return to school. Jason Everman, a former guitarist for Nirvana, briefly played with the band before Ben Shepherd joined in early 1990 and the lineup that would record Badmotorfinger settled into place. With Shepherd in and drummer Matt Cameron developing as a songwriter, the group dynamic shifted again on that 1991 record. But Louder Than Love is the hinge point, the moment the change began.
Cornell’s emergence as a charismatic focal point landed at precisely the moment MTV’s 120 Minutes had identified a new breed of figureheads on the alternative fringe: Mike Patton, Trent Reznor, Perry Farrell. The timing mattered, even if the album’s chart performance didn’t quite reflect it. Louder Than Love peaked at number 108 on the Billboard 200, which is not the kind of figure that rewrites industry history. But chart positions tell you what people bought in the moment; they don’t tell you what got played at obnoxious volume in shared hotel rooms all summer, or what pushed a generation of listeners across the divide from metal into something stranger and harder to categorise.
That, in the end, is what Louder Than Love actually did: not reach the mainstream, but build a bridge between the underground and a new musical vanguard whose influence would be felt for the next decade and beyond. Badmotorfinger and Superunknown would bring greater poise, greater commercial reach, greater everything. But this is the record where Soundgarden stopped being ungainly local heroes and started building their own architecture. It has been 35 years. The blueprint still holds.
