[PREORDER] Hole - Pretty On The Inside [RSD Essential]

Three years before Live Through This made them a household name, Hole made a record with nothing to lose. Cut at Music Box Studios in Los Angeles in March 1991 and released that September on Caroline, Pretty on the Inside is eleven tracks of scorched, howling noise rock that sounds less produced than provoked. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and Gumball's Don Fleming ran the sessions, and rather than sand anything down, they pushed the band deeper into the red.

This is the original lineup at full strength: Courtney Love, Eric Erlandson, Jill Emery, and Caroline Rue, playing like the tape might catch fire. Erlandson's guitars sit somewhere between skronk and sludge, Rue's drums swing harder than the chaos around them suggests, and Love's voice moves from a mutter to a full-throated scream without warning. "Teenage Whore" went to No. 1 on the UK Indie Chart, while "Garbadge Man," "Babydoll," and "Good Sister/Bad Sister" show a band already writing real hooks and then burying them under feedback on purpose.

It remains the most uncompromising thing in the catalog. Later Hole records had bigger budgets, cleaner mixes, and hit singles, but this is the one people return to when they want the band unfiltered, and its influence runs straight through the noisier corners of the nineties underground and everything that has followed.

This Record Store Day Essentials edition arrives newly remastered for vinyl and overseen by founding guitarist Eric Erlandson, pressed on Pink Cloud vinyl. Thirty-five years on, it has lost none of its ability to sound genuinely dangerous.