The Hole Reissues Put Two Lost B-Sides on Streaming

“Teenage Whore” opens on a guitar tone that sounds like it was tracked in a room with the door open: thin, sour, deliberately unhelpful. It went to number one on the UK Indie Chart in 1991 and has since collected more than 16 million Spotify streams. The two tracks that sat on the back of that single, “Burn Black” and “Drown Soda”, have never been available to stream at all.

That changes on 18 September, when UMe puts out the Hole reissues: new vinyl pressings of Pretty On The Inside, Live Through This and Celebrity Skin, with guitarist and co-founder Eric Erlandson overseeing every part of the project. The two B-sides make their streaming debut alongside the physical release.

What Erlandson Went Back and Fixed

Erlandson personally spearheaded the campaign rather than signing off on a catalogue exercise, and the detail shows in what was done to each record. All three albums have been newly mastered for vinyl. Artwork has been faithfully reproduced, packaging restored, and ephemera that did not survive the original runs put back in the sleeve.

This matters more than it sounds for a catalogue that has been circulating in poor shape. Pretty On The Inside was recorded at Music Box Studios in Los Angeles with Don Fleming and Kim Gordon producing, and its sound is a specific set of decisions rather than an accident: the guitars are abrasive because they were tracked that way. A bad transfer flattens exactly the thing that makes it work. A careful one does not.

The lineup on that first record was Courtney Love, Erlandson, Jill Emery on bass and Caroline Rue on drums. It is a different band from the one that made either of the two albums that followed, which is part of why treating the three as a single reissue campaign is a more interesting move than it first appears.

Two B-Sides That Never Made It to Streaming

The 35th-anniversary edition of Pretty On The Inside carries a newly remastered 12-inch of the “Teenage Whore” single with “Burn Black” and “Drown Soda” attached. Both then arrive on streaming platforms for the first time.

For a band whose catalogue is otherwise thoroughly digitised, two genuinely unstreamed recordings is unusual. B-sides from the early nineties routinely disappeared into this gap: they were pressed once, distributed through independent retail, and then simply not carried forward when labels moved catalogues to digital in the 2000s. A track had to be on an album to survive that migration by default. These two were not.

The practical consequence is that a listener who came to the band through streaming has never had access to them at any price. That is the part of this release with the widest reach, even though it will be the least visible line on the announcement.

The Starbelly Splatter Pressing and Its Lithograph

The limited 35th-anniversary edition is a 2LP on what UMe is calling Starbelly Splatter vinyl, sold direct to consumer rather than through retail. It comes with new gatefold artwork and a lithograph of a rare band photo, plus the remastered 12-inch single.

Standard editions cover the rest of the demand: 1LP on 180g black vinyl and a CD. The split is a familiar one for catalogue releases now, with the collector edition carrying the ephemera and the standard pressing carrying the music at a normal price, and it is a reasonable way to fund the restoration work without making the album itself expensive.

How a Zoetrope Pressing Animates the Videos

The technically interesting format sits on the other two albums. Live Through This and Celebrity Skin both get zoetrope vinyl: a picture disc etched with sequential frames that animate when the record spins at speed under the right light.

The frames are not decorative here. They are drawn from each album’s original music videos, and the Live Through This pressing also uses previously unseen footage from those video shoots. That makes the disc an archive object as much as a playback format, which is a rarer thing than a coloured pressing.

Both albums are also available as 1LP 180g black vinyl, with Live Through This including its original booklet, for anyone who wants the new master without the visual edition.

Three Records, Three Different Rhythm Sections

Live Through This arrived in 1994 with Love and Erlandson joined by Kristen Pfaff on bass and Patty Schemel on drums. It produced “Violet”, “Doll Parts”, “Jennifer’s Body” and “Miss World”, went platinum, and has since collected a 10.0 from Pitchfork and places on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time and its 50 Greatest Grunge Albums list.

Celebrity Skin, four years later, is a different proposition again. Melissa Auf der Maur played bass, Michael Beinhorn produced, and the record was tracked at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles with a cleaner, more deliberately radio-shaped sound than anything the band had made before. It debuted in the top ten of the Billboard 200, went platinum, and drew four Grammy nominations: Best Rock Album, Best Rock Song for the title track, and Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group for both the title track and “Malibu”.

Its streaming numbers are the figure worth pausing on. Celebrity Skin has accumulated close to a billion cumulative streams, which puts a 1998 rock album in company usually reserved for catalogue by much larger acts. Pitchfork’s retrospective review gave it a 9.0. The record that was treated at the time as the commercial pivot has turned out to be the one carrying the heaviest listening load three decades on.

Why a New Vinyl Master Matters on These Three Records

Remastering is often cosmetic. On this catalogue it is not, because the three albums were tracked to three genuinely different standards and have suffered differently since.

Pretty On The Inside was built to sound difficult. Fleming and Gordon kept the guitars close to distortion and let the room bleed into the takes, and the low end sits high in the mix in a way that most mastering engineers of the period would have tamed. Transfers made for CD in the nineties routinely compressed that character out, which is how a record with real dynamic range ended up circulating as a flat, loud object. A master cut specifically for vinyl gives the amp noise somewhere to go again.

Live Through This has the opposite problem. It is a tightly arranged record with clean guitar separation and a rhythm section doing a lot of quiet work behind the vocal, and it has been reissued enough times that the versions in circulation vary noticeably. Schemel’s drums in particular tend to lose their attack in a poor pressing, which flattens songs that depend on the tension between a controlled arrangement and an uncontrolled vocal.

Celebrity Skin was mastered loud on purpose. Beinhorn built it for radio and it sounds like it, all upfront guitars and compressed choruses, and that was the right call at the time. The question a new vinyl cut answers is whether there is headroom underneath that was sacrificed to the format war of the late nineties. Given the streaming numbers the record is now carrying, more people will hear whatever is recovered than heard the original pressing.

None of this is a claim that the Hole reissues will sound better than a well-kept original. It is a claim that the median copy in circulation is not a well-kept original, and that a considered cut from the source is the more reliable thing to hand a new listener.

Where the Record Store Day Editions Land

Independent retail gets its own run. Record Store Day Essential colour vinyl editions of all three albums reach independent shops on 23 October, five weeks after the main release.

Staggering it that way is now standard practice, and it does two things at once: it gives the direct-to-consumer and mainstream retail editions a clear window, then gives independent shops an exclusive to sell into the autumn. For a catalogue with this much collector demand, both channels will move stock.

What the campaign as a whole reflects is a catalogue being maintained rather than merely relicensed. New masters, restored artwork, recovered video footage and two recordings pulled back from the format gap is a substantial amount of work for three albums that would sell perfectly well as straight repressings. It is the same instinct visible elsewhere in the archives right now, including the careful handling of unreleased material in the Soundgarden vaults, where the question is less what exists than how it should be presented.

The Hole reissues answer that question by putting the decisions in the hands of someone who made the records. Full details are on the UMe announcement, and the full format breakdown lists every configuration.

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