Superunknown

Official Review

The Seattle band's fourth album, recorded with producer Michael Beinhorn after the growing success of Badmotorfinger, marks the moment Soundgarden largely abandons grunge in the strict sense for a broader style of writing, indebted as much to '70s metal (Black Sabbath, already featured in this catalog) as to British psychedelia. Chris Cornell writes most of the lyrics and melodies using alternate tunings and odd time signatures — Black Hole Sun is in 4/4 but with a vocal phrasing that seems constantly out of step with it, The Day I Tried to Live alternates between 6/4 and 4/4 without a clear seam — building an album that sounds accessible on the surface while remaining structurally unstable underneath. Black Hole Sun, the single that pushed the album to mass commercial success, hides an apocalyptic lyric and a controversial video full of distorted images of American residential neighborhoods behind a nearly pop melody — a contrast between reassuring form and disturbing content that runs through the entire album. Fell on Black Days works over a chord progression that moves in descending chromatic steps, producing a sensation of constant falling consistent with its lyric about clinical depression. 4th of July, the slowest and heaviest track on the record, builds an almost doom-metal crescendo on a riff that directly recalls the slower end of Black Sabbath. The connection to J.G. Ballard here lies in how the album treats the American suburban landscape — explicitly evoked in the Black Hole Sun video — as psychologically unstable territory, capable of producing alienation and latent violence beneath a surface of residential normalcy. It's the same principle Ballard applies in his novels: the built environment not as neutral backdrop but as an active agent in the psychic dissolution of those who inhabit it. Superunknown applies this same pattern to the American suburb of the mid-'90s, with a commercial success that ended up rendering that unsettling imagery familiar to the point of banality. Superunknown debuted at number one on the Billboard chart and remains the band's best-selling album — the point at which Soundgarden reached a mass audience just as their songwriting was drifting furthest from the conventions of the genre that had launched them.