It starts the way most long weeks start for Jack Endino: coffee gone cold, reels stacked, faders half-up, and something already clipping in the monitors.
//
SEPTEMBER 29, 1985 — TRIAD STUDIOS
Kurt is still in the booth, messing with the last vocal lines of "Bleach Baby", that proto–Teen Spirit chug they all pretended wasn't obviously a monster of a hook. Rory and Krist are on the couch, leaning in like they're waiting for an explosion.
"Alright," Jack mutters, rolling back the tape. "Let's hear this thing from the top."
The track slams in immediately—Rory's drums huge even before Jack officially does anything, that Bonham weight but with something sharper, wilder, like every hit is a prediction of the future. Jack doesn't say it yet, but he's thinking it.
Kurt's scratch vocal drops in, half-scream, half-melody.
Krist starts laughing. "Dude. Dude. That's actually sick."
Rory grins but tries not to look too excited, tapping his sticks on his knees in perfect tempo with his own recorded self.
Jack keeps a straight face. "Relax. This is the rough rough mix. It'll sound good when I actually EQ something."
The next playback hits the chorus and the room shifts—Kurt's doubled scream chokes the speaker cones for a second. Kurt's face lights up.
"I didn't even mean to sound like that," he says quietly, rubbing the back of his neck. "But it's kinda… cool?"
Rory snorts. "Kurt, it sounds like you got set on fire and liked it."
The Triad assistant walking past the hallway sticks his head in. "What the hell is that?"
Jack waves him off. "Don't worry about it."
But the kid just shakes his head, impressed. "Damn."
They run through "Anorexorcist" next, Kurt's backwards solo a garbled monster in its raw state.
Krist whistles. "Sounds like Satan surfing."
Jack scratches notes. Varispeed. Make it meaner.
Then they hit "Pen Cap Chew", and Rory's tom fills escalate into something that makes Kurt actually laugh mid-playback.
"You're twelve," he tells Rory, "you shouldn't be allowed to drum like that."
Rory shrugs, but inside he's already counting where the future will go.
By evening, the roughs are big enough to make everyone pace around the room.
Kurt sits up straight. "This… sounds like a real band."
Jack doesn't say it out loud, but yeah. It does.
//
Drums first. Always drums.
He rewinds mentally to Rory's kicks—every single hit dead-on, heavy enough that Jack kept checking the meters to see if they were lying. Kid plays like Bonham if Bonham drank rocket fuel. Tight, wild, perfectly timed. Not human at twelve.
Then the guitars—Kurt's tone had this sticky grit, like the amp wanted to collapse. The riffs were simple but carved with intention, and the way he dragged the pick made everything feel unstable in a good way.
And the vocals—raw, unfiltered throat-noise. Screams that didn't feel like posing.
This is the real thing. Not Seattle bar-band noise. This is something else.
He flips his notebook page. I'm mixing this like Led Zeppelin produced Black Flag. No polish, no high-end sugarcoating. Low-end like a basement collapsing. Everything hitting the red. Make it breathe but suffocate at the same time.
He writes the chain down:
Kick + snare → Triad plate reverb
Parallel comp for the room mics
Vocal doubling on choruses
Varispeed the backwards solo
Bass → SVT → RE-20, no DI
Final prints slammed to +3 VU
He taps his pen.
These kids don't know it yet, but we're building a bomb.
//
SEPTEMBER 30, 1985
Jack's at the board at 8:01 a.m. Rory is already behind him eating cereal out of a paper cup.
"You sleep here or something?" Krist asks as he walks in.
"Mixing," Jack says. "Lots of it."
Kurt drops his jacket on an amp. "Make my screams louder. But not too loud. But loud."
Jack rolls tape on "Bleach Baby" again, doing the first real pass. He dials in the plate reverb, just enough tail to thunder under Rory's snare without drowning it.
Rory leans forward. "That's the sound. That's exactly it."
Krist nods. "Bass still needs more growl."
Jack smirks. "Already printed it through an SVT. It's pure filth."
"Huh," Krist says. "Nice."
The Triad receptionist wanders by with mail, pauses, and mutters, "Jesus… that's loud," then keeps walking.
Jack prints two versions of each song—one dry enough to punch your face in, and one drenched in reverb like you're trapped in an industrial freezer.
By 7:59 p.m., Jack can't feel his ears, but the mixes are alive.
//
OCTOBER 1, 1985
Rory, Kurt, and Krist sit behind Jack like kids watching fireworks.
Jack hits play on "Anorexorcist," now fully mixed. The room explodes—parallel-compressed room mics making every fill sound like someone dropped bombs across the toms.
Kurt's eyebrows shoot up. "Holy—"
Krist laughs, slapping the couch. "This is stupid good."
Rory tries to keep a straight face, fails, and ends up shaking his leg like he's about to levitate.
They go through each song, picking favorites between the dry and the reverb-drenched versions. Surprisingly, Rory keeps choosing the filthier ones.
Kurt says, "Make the chorus vocals wider. Like, tear-apart wide."
Jack nods and pans the doubled vocals hard left and right until it feels like Kurt is screaming from both walls at once.
Krist listens carefully and mutters, "This is kinda unreal."
Rory adds, "It's only our first EP."
Jack thinks, Exactly. And it already sounds like a warhead.
//
OCTOBER 2, 1985
Jack recalls every mix, tightening tiny details—rolling off a bit of mud on the toms, bumping Kurt's breaths before screams, carving a little more space for Krist's bass so it punches without overwhelming.
Kurt eats crackers while arguing track order with Krist.
"Start with 'Bleach Baby,'" Kurt insists. "It's the punch."
"Yeah," Krist agrees. "Then Anorexorcist. Then the fast one."
Rory just nods like a quiet architect of chaos.
Jack sneaks in a short tape snippet as a hidden track—a messy 20-second bleed of them joking around before a take, something only real fans will dig for.
Triad staff drift through occasionally, pretending not to listen but clearly impressed.
One engineer stops at the door. "You guys are gonna make the metal bands look soft."
Kurt grins awkwardly. "Uh… thanks?"
By the end of the day, everything is sequenced, everything locked.
//
OCTOBER 3, 1985
Jack stands over the lathe at Wakefield with a pride he tries not to show. The grooves cut hot and deep—too loud for most engineers, but exactly as loud as he wants.
Rory leans on the wall, arms crossed, watching like someone who's seen the future and is satisfied it's on track.
Krist whistles when he sees the freshly cut disc. "Looks expensive."
Kurt squints. "Is this really ours?"
Jack holds the acetate by the edge, smirking. "Yep. Loudest EP in the Northwest."
Rory's eyes light up behind him, something older and wiser burning through the 12-year-old exterior.
Kurt takes the disc carefully. "Can we… listen to it?"
Jack nods, drops the needle. The room is instantly swallowed by the monstrous mix—low-end earthquake, guitars snarling, Kurt screaming from two galaxies at once, Rory's drums detonating in huge, reverberant blasts.
The engineer at Wakefield shouts over it, "You mixed this? It's insane!"
Jack just folds his arms and listens.
Inside, he's thinking one thing and one thing only:
I just mixed the heaviest, weirdest, catchiest thing I've ever touched. This isn't an EP. This is the beginning of something that's going to destroy everything.
And as the acetate keeps spinning, the future quietly clicks into place.