The album was recorded in late 1993 and released in 1994, four days after Kurt Cobain’s death. Although that fact undoubtedly drew more attention to the album’s release at the time, it’s unfair to speak about it in those terms, although the specter of that history is so large I don’t know how anyone could shake it off.

Courtney Love is an absolute force of nature as a singer, and this album is Hole’s biggest and best attempt to capture their popular potential. That’s not to say it’s poppy - this album is poppy in the way any great grunge-rock album was, mostly by having great hooks and enjoying success in the charts. But like any great genre album that also happens to sell well, the hooks are used as they should be used - as an on-ramp into something deeper.

This album often gets lumped into the “angry girl music” category or even riot grrrl along with some of Hole’s contemporaries, but to be honest that makes me a very angry boy. Maybe society in the early 90’s wasn’t ready to handle a female personality as huge as Courtney Love’s without ascribing her success to other factors, like the dumb rumors that her husband Cobain helped her write the songs on this album. And OK, I get that music historians are always looking for ways to categorize music from 30 years ago in the interest of satisfying their OCD. But we have to grow past that tendency. This is powerful grungey punky rock of a unique flavor, only made better by the fact that the nuanced feelings of frustration and disillusionment come from a female perspective that was underrepresented in 1994. It’s still a little annoying to label this grunge or rock or whatever as I’m kind of doing, because those labels are pretty well-established in the music media to refer to the Vedder-Cornell-Weiland-Corgan-Cobain ruling class, but it’s better than calling this “girl rock” and moving on. This album is visceral and emotive and brilliant, and although Hole doesn’t need to be stuck into a single category, maybe the categories that exist need to include Hole to become more well-rounded descriptors of an awesome musical era. Grunge should be fighting for the honor of counting Hole as part of its roster, even if Hole doesn’t want anything to do with it.

From the roundup Jamwise #47 - Best Albums of 1994, pt. 2.