Pearl Jam's No Code album turns 30, and The Quietus calls it grunge's Kid A

Pearl Jam released No Code in 1996, and 30 years on The Quietus has used the anniversary to argue that it, not Nirvana's In Utero, was the record where grunge deliberately turned away from the audience it had just won.

JR Moores builds the case on how little the album tries to be liked. Where the band's previous records opened with a loud rock song, No Code eases in with the quiet "Sometimes". The lead single, "Who You Are", was a self-defeating commercial choice: it is built on a polyrhythmic drum pattern taken from the bebop drummer Max Roach, with Eddie Vedder playing electric sitar and singing about transcendental consequence.

The reception matched the intent. Pitchfork gave the album 5.4 out of 10 and complained that it was almost all filler, a line Moores turns back on the reviewer by asking whether a record that is entirely filler is doing something more deliberate than padding. He draws the same parallel with the people who said Kid A had no songs on it.

The circumstances around the sessions were not calm. The band were still tangled in their much-mocked and ultimately futile campaign against Ticketmaster. Bassist Jeff Ament did not learn the band were recording until three days in and nearly quit over it. Vedder was being pursued by a stalker, which is why he had contributed so little to the band's 1995 album with Neil Young, and said afterwards that leaving the house was not the easiest thing to do.

His Grammy acceptance speech in early 1996 was of a piece with all of it. He told the room he did not know what the award meant and did not think it meant anything, then added that this was simply how he felt.

The commercial result was what the band appeared to want. No Code was the first Pearl Jam album to miss multi-platinum status, and Vedder later said that even people who loved the band's music were not aware it existed. Moores' argument is that Radiohead fumbled their own attempt to repel an audience, because Kid A succeeded anyway, while Pearl Jam managed it.

Thirty years on, the record reads better for the same reasons it sold worse. It sits alongside the site's other rock anniversary coverage, including the same outlet's look back at 50 years of ABBA's Dancing Queen and the band's own debut, revisited by Clash at 35.