BlackHoleSun
Soundgarden
Superunknown (Deluxe Edition)
A gorgeous apocalypse hymn draped in dissonance and Pacific Northwest dread.
In my eyes
Indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face
Lies the snake
And the sun in my disgrace
Boiling heat
Summer stench
Neath the black, the sky looks dead
Call my name
Through the cream
And I'll hear you scream again
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come
Won't you come
Stuttering
Cold and damp
Steal the warm wind, tired friend
Times are gone
For honest men
Sometimes, far too long for snakes
In my shoes
Walking sleep
In my youth, I pray to keep
Heaven send
Hell away
No one sings like you anymore
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come? (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Hang my head
Drown my fear
Till you all just disappear
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come
Won't you come
In my eyes
Indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face
Lies the snake
And the sun in my disgrace
Boiling heat
Summer stench
Neath the black, the sky looks dead
Call my name
Through the cream
And I'll hear you scream again
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come
Won't you come
Stuttering
Cold and damp
Steal the warm wind, tired friend
Times are gone
For honest men
Sometimes, far too long for snakes
In my shoes
Walking sleep
In my youth, I pray to keep
Heaven send
Hell away
No one sings like you anymore
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come? (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Hang my head
Drown my fear
Till you all just disappear
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come
Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come (Black hole sun, black hole sun)
Won't you come
Won't you come
“A gorgeous apocalypse hymn draped in dissonance and Pacific Northwest dread.”
The genesis of "Black Hole Sun" is one of rock's great accidents of the subconscious.
Chris Cornell claimed the title arrived in his head fully formed — not from astrophysics, not from science fiction, but from a misheard phrase, possibly a news broadcast, that lodged itself in his brain like a splinter.
He sat down with an acoustic guitar in his Seattle home in late 1993 and wrote the entire song in roughly fifteen minutes, a burst of automatic writing that felt, as he later described it, like channeling something rather than composing it.
The band was deep into sessions for what would become "Superunknown," their fourth studio album and the record that would catapult them from grunge heavyweights to genuine mainstream titans.
Cornell was navigating the strange psychic terrain of a man on the verge of enormous fame, still tethered to the underground ethos that had shaped him, sensing that something was about to irrevocably change.
Recorded at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle with producer Michael Beinhorn — who had previously helmed records for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Marianne Faithfull — "Black Hole Sun" is a masterclass in controlled tension.
The song lives in E minor but refuses to stay there obediently, slithering through unexpected chord changes that borrow from the Beatles' psychedelic palette as much as from Black Sabbath's tectonic weight.
Kim Thayil's guitar work is a study in textured restraint and explosive release: the verses shimmer with chorus-drenched clean tones and subtly detuned intervals that create an almost seasick sense of unease, while the chorus opens into a massive wall of distortion that somehow feels both cathartic and deeply unsettling.
Matt Cameron's drumming is metronomic yet organic at 125 BPM, a heartbeat beneath the hallucination.
Ben Shepherd's bass provides a low-end gravity that keeps the song's psychedelic tendencies from floating away entirely.
Beinhorn's production is immaculate — warm and analog-feeling, with a depth of field that rewards headphone listening, every layer placed with surgical precision yet breathing with the looseness of a live performance.
Lyrically, "Black Hole Sun" is Cornell at his most surrealist and elusive.
The words read like fever-dream poetry: faces hidden in disguise, snakes lying beneath surfaces, a sky that "looks dead" under boiling summer heat.
Cornell himself admitted the lyrics were largely imagistic rather than narrative, assembled more for their sonic and emotional texture than for linear meaning.
Yet a coherent emotional arc emerges — a world rotting beneath a veneer of normalcy, a narrator who is exhausted, disgusted, and longing for obliteration.
The central metaphor is breathtaking in its paradox: a black hole sun, an object that simultaneously radiates and devours, a source of light that is also an annihilating void.
The plea "won't you come and wash away the rain" is not a prayer for salvation but for erasure — an apocalyptic cleansing that would take everything, the beautiful and the corrupt alike.
The closing verse — "Hang my head, drown my fear, till you all just disappear" — strips away the surrealism and reveals raw desperation, a man begging for the world to simply stop.
Released as the third single from "Superunknown" in May 1994, "Black Hole Sun" became Soundgarden's signature song almost immediately.
It reached number one on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, where it stayed for seven weeks, and also topped the Modern Rock chart.
The album itself debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, a remarkable feat for a band rooted in the underground metal and punk scenes of the 1980s.
The song won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1995, cementing Soundgarden's place alongside Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains in the pantheon of Seattle rock.
Howard Greenhalgh's iconic music video — a nightmarish suburban tableau of grinning, distorted faces melting into oblivion — became one of MTV's most heavily rotated clips of the era and remains one of the most visually distinctive videos of the 1990s.
Critics hailed the song as proof that grunge could be ambitious, psychedelic, and compositionally sophisticated without sacrificing emotional rawness.
The cultural footprint of "Black Hole Sun" has only deepened with time, and it took on an almost unbearable poignancy after Chris Cornell's death on May 18, 2017.
In the hours following the news, a statue of Cornell was erected outside the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, and fans worldwide played the song as an elegy for its creator.
It has appeared in films, television shows, and video games, becoming a kind of shorthand for the sound and spirit of 1990s alternative rock.
Covers have ranged from Norah Jones's haunting piano rendition to post-rock reinterpretations, each version revealing new dimensions in Cornell's composition.
The song endures because it captures something universal and timeless — the longing for an impossible rescue, the beauty found in contemplating destruction, the strange comfort of surrendering to forces beyond comprehension.
In Soundgarden's catalog, it stands as the perfect fusion of their early heaviness and their later melodic ambition.
In the broader history of rock music, it is simply one of the greatest songs ever written: a four-and-a-half-minute apocalypse that sounds like the end of the world and the beginning of something transcendent.
