Pretty on the Inside is the debut studio album by American alternative rock band Hole, released on September 17, 1991, in the United States on Caroline Records. Produced by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, and Gumball frontman Don Fleming, the album was Hole's first major label release after the band's formation in 1989 by vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist Courtney Love and lead guitarist Eric Erlandson.
Blending elements of punk rock, the album features distorted and alternating guitar compositions, screaming vocals from Love, and "sloppy punk ethics", a style which the band would later distance themselves from, opting for a less abrasive sound on subsequent releases. Love's lyrics on the album are often presented in an abstract narrative form, and describe disparate scenes of graphic violence, death, and female sexuality. The record was dedicated to Rob Ritter of the Los Angeles punk rock acts the Bags and the Gun Club.
Upon release, Pretty on the Inside was well-received by alternative music critics, garnering favorable reviews that drew comparisons to the works of Black Sabbath and Patti Smith. It was met with considerable commercial success in the United Kingdom, where the record's lead single, "Teenage Whore", entered the UK Indie Chart at number one in September 1991. It has sold over 200,000 copies in the United States and gained a contemporary cult following among punk rock fans, and has been cited as a seminal influence for songwriters and musicians such as Brody Dalle and Scout Niblett. Despite its critical acclaim, frontwoman Courtney Love went on to refer to the album as "unlistenable" in later years, though her stance on it eventually shifted, as she commented in 2021 that she had "really put the album down," and that making it was a "transformative" experience for her. Vinyl LP versions of the album have been reissued several times.
Background Hole formed in 1989 in Los Angeles, California when frontwoman Courtney Love, after years of fruitless attempts at forming bands, bought her neighbor Lisa Roberts a bass and posted an advertisement in a local paper stating: "I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac." Eric Erlandson, along with over a dozen other musicians, answered the ad. Love later said that she knew Eric was "the one" as soon as they met, and that he had a "Thurston Moore quality about him" that she liked.
Erlandson said that early in Hole's career, they were more interested in "making noise" than achieving success and before drummer Caroline Rue joined the band that they used no percussion whatsoever. It was not until Love and Erlandson heard Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" that they began to think about taking the band to the next level. Early on, the band was most influenced by the New York No Wave art and music scene of the 1980s, which included visual artists, such as Richard Kern, as well as scuzz rock acts, such as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Sonic Youth, and Pussy Galore. The band also featured a rhythm guitarist in its early days, Mike Geisbrecht. After the band's first four shows, Geisbrecht and Roberts departed from the band. Hole recruited bassist Jill Emery in 1990, and the band remained a quartet instead of replacing Geisbrecht.
In the documentary film Not Bad for a Girl, Love, who had been in the erotic dancing industry for years prior, said that she worked as a stripper to help support the band in its early incarnation. She also cited her work as a dancer as being one of many inspirations for the songs on Pretty on the Inside: "I was blonde, wore makeup, had to support my band by dancing, and had to play this ridiculous archetype at work ... so I took, you know, high heels and white pumps, and I had a wiglet—I just took that and messed with it."
Recording and production
Hole had previously released two singles, "Retard Girl" on Sympathy for the Record Industry and "Dicknail" on Sub Pop. According to Love, she had initially wanted to release the album on Sympathy for the Record Industry, but was "talked into" signing on with Caroline Records. After signing, Love sought Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon to produce the album. In January 1991, Love sent her a letter, a Hello Kitty barrette, and copies of the band's early singles, mentioning that the band greatly admired Gordon's work and appreciated "the production of the SST record" (referring to Sonic Youth's EVOL or Sister). Gordon agreed on the condition that her friend, Gumball frontman Don Fleming, assist. The band entered Music Box Studios in Los Angeles with Gordon and Fleming in March 1991, and worked on the album for one week; the songs were recorded over a period of four days, and were mixed over the course of a further three days. During the recording sessions for the album, Love purportedly gargled whiskey and excessively smoked cigarettes before takes to give a raw edge to her vocals.
Fleming stated he was impressed by Love's "focus and intensity", especially while recording vocals for one song when Love "literally ripped her clothes off while she sang". "Courtney was amazing", said Fleming. "She was the most gung-ho person I've ever met. She was going to make the greatest record ever—I like that attitude in the studio. Courtney was like 'Let's go, fuckers', and I loved that." In a later interview, Fleming said: Courtney was great at the time—it was before she even knew Kurt [Cobain]. She gave 180%. I've worked with some people that you've had to coax the performance out of them. With Courtney, there was no attitude. She was gonna give it all. And she did and it was really impressive to me ... I loved the whole band; they were a lot of fun. That early lineup of Hole—I felt they were the real deal. They were Hollywood misfits—all of them. I felt it really captured what they were.
Gordon said that Love "was either charming and nice or screaming at her band" but that she was "a really good singer and entertainer and front person."
From her own recollection, Love said that the recording sessions lasted "about a week... Eric was in charge of the [guitar] tones, and I just did whatever the fuck I wanted." According to Rue, Gordon encouraged the band to freely improvise in the studio, which resulted in the recording of several tracks that appear on the album, such as "Sassy". Rue injured her finger on a diecast rim while recording the song, and ceased her drumming; Love is heard in the track saying "sit back down, sit back down" in response to Rue standing up from her drum kit.
Composition Music and arrangements The music of Pretty on the Inside has been noted by critics for its abrasive instrumentation and arrangements, often with melodies "buried" underneath. The album's sonic elements are heavily influenced by Los Angeles hardcore punk as well as New York's no wave scene; many of the tracks are accompanied by overt use of feedback, experimental playing, wah pedals, and use of sampling and interpolation. Rapid sliding techniques and string muting are also heavily present on the album, as well as what Love and Erlandson describe as "Sonic Youth tunings". Love's vocals range from whispers to violent screaming, often in succession with the extreme shifts in speed and volume.
Drummer Caroline Rue described the band's songwriting process as collaborative and organic; she stated that she wrote her own drum parts in response to Love's guitar playing and lyrics, adding that Love never gave her direction or requested that she make changes to her drumming approach.
The album contains numerous musical references to other musicians and songs, specifically in "Sassy" and "Starbelly": The guitar riff featured in "Starbelly" is based on Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" and features analog cassette excerpts from "Rhiannon" by Fleetwood Mac and an early recording of "Best Sunday Dress" by Pagan Babies, one of Love's earlier bands with Kat Bjelland; "Sassy" includes snippets from an angry message left by Nymphs singer Inger Lorre on Love's answering machine, accompanied by a singular chord progression repeated throughout. Love has admitted that the main riff to "Mrs. Jones" was copied verbatim from "Dark Entries" by the goth rock group Bauhaus, one of her favorite bands as a teenager.
In a 1991 Canadian television interview, Love commented on the album's coarse musical structure. She said that since the band was from Los Angeles, the "metal capital of the US", they thought they were making a "pop record with an edge", and were surprised by people's reactions when they were told it was violent and extreme. Love added, "It was all about the expression of my experience. I was not coming from a black void; I was trying to create light ... I was trying to heal." In an interview with Spin magazine several years after its release, Love said that she was "posing in a lot of ways" with the album: "It was the truth, but it was also me catching up with all my hip peers who'd gone all indie on me, and who made fun of me for liking R.E.M. and The Smiths. I'd done the whole punk thing, sleeping on floors in piss and beer, and waking up with the guy with the fucking mohawk and the skateboards and the speed and the whole goddamned thing. But I hated it. I'd grown out of it by the time I was seventeen." In a 1994 interview with Kurt Loder, Love admitted to having been "consciously self-conscious" when making the record due to her feeling the need to compete with her peers at the time.
In the 2011 documentary Hit So Hard, based on Hole's 1994–98 drummer Patty Schemel, Love referred to Pretty on the Inside as "unlistenable". "That record was a calling card for rock critics and hardcorers", Love said. "[It was me saying] "This is what I do, and I'm not going to back down from it. I am announcing my persona as a cunt.""
Lyrical content
Many of the album's lyrics are narrative and diaristic in nature, and were heavily drawn from Love's personal life and experiences in her teenage and young adult years. In a press release promoting the album, Love said: "These songs are about my own weaknesses and impurities; things about myself that I hate ... paranoias, petty concerns, and pithy, pathetic things that are inside of me." Many of the songs are lyrically abstract and describe shocking scenes of violence. Recurrent themes and motifs in the lyrics include elitism, beauty and self-image, abortion, prostitution, suicide, murder, "red lights", and self-destructiveness. Qs Peter Kane described the lyrics on the record as "confrontational" and "genuinely uninhibited".
In a 1991 interview with Love, journalist Ed Condran noted the influence of Los Angeles's underworld on the album: "The songs are allegories which detail Hollywood's filthy underbelly. Tales of teenage prostitution, violence, and superficiality are dramatically and graphically rendered. Some are so vivid a few writers assumed Love was writing from personal experience. However, she says the narratives are all fictional." Reflecting on Los Angeles in an interview the year prior, Love said: "When I first came down here I said it was the ugliest place I'd ever seen and I would never fucking live here. And now I'm here."
Hannah Levin of the Seattle publication The Stranger analyzed the lyrics to the track "Mrs. Jones", calling it a "particularly rattling sketch of what appears to be a rape scene, with Love seamlessly handling three perspectives: the ugly attacker ("Look into the bloodrot, you suicide bitch / It takes an hour with you to make me want to live"), the vengeful victim ("The abortion left an abscess / Don't ever talk to me like that again"), and the supportive narrator ("Just like a pro, she takes off her dress / And she kicks you down in her snow white pumps")." The song also quotes the Rudyard Kipling poem The Ballad of East and West.