Soundgarden’s second album was one of transition. For starters, it was the final record to feature founding bassist Hiro Yamamoto, who quit after making the LP due to the band’s increasingly intense touring schedule. (He would be replaced briefly by former Nirvana guitarist Jason Everman, who then made way for longtime bassist Ben Shepherd.) It was also the Seattle quartet’s first album for a major label, having signed with A&M after releasing their debut full-length, 1988’s Ultramega OK, on legendary indie SST. (Soundgarden was the first band from the then-nascent grunge scene to make that leap to a major.) On a musical level, the 1989 album marks the bridge between the group’s rawer, more punk-influenced approach of Ultramega OK and their Screaming Life (1987) and Fopp (1988) EPs—releases laced with doses of humor, sarcasm, and cynicism—and the more metallic and lyrically somber approach of 1991’s Badmotorfinger. The humor comes in the shape of the unhinged punk of “Full on Kevin’s Mom,” about a buddy of vocalist Chris Cornell’s who slept with the mother of a friend, while “Big Dumb Sex” is a withering comment on the vacuous nature of the hair-metal scene that was dominating charts at the time (it would, ironically, be covered by Guns N’ Roses on their 1993 album of punk covers The Spaghetti Incident?). Less humorously, the wailing “Hands All Over” is inspired by the mistreatment of the environment (“Hands all over the inland forest/In a striking motion, trees fall down like dying soldiers”). While the late-’80s hard-rock scene was populated with preening, image-conscious outfits such as Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, and Europe, the Terry Date-produced Louder Than Love was a leaner, rawer affair devoid of commercial gloss and affectations, a willful differentiator from Soundgarden’s so-called hard-rock contemporaries. Drawing comparisons to Led Zeppelin due to Cornell’s piercing vocals, in reality songs such as “Ugly Truth” and “Gun” draw from the Toni Iommi school of doom-riffing, while the band’s fondness for experimentation is evident in the complicated 9/4 time signature of “Get On the Snake” and the restless musical shifts of “Gun.” The eerie “No Wrong No Right,” meanwhile, foretells of the noisy discordance the band would further explore on songs such as “New Damage” on Badmotorfinger. With Nirvana releasing Bleach and Mudhoney dropping their self-titled debut in the same year as Louder Than Love, the music scene was on the verge of a changing of the guard. And while Soundgarden would go on to make more accomplished albums than Louder Than Love, as the sound of an outfit unburdened by commercial expectations and high on their raw creative whims, it stands as a triumph.