Twenty years after the release of Nirvana’s landmark Nevermind album, Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge offers the definitive overview of a musical time and place.

Grunge, also known as the ‘Seattle sound’, is the sludgy fusion of punk rock and heavy metal that emerged from the Pacific Northwest in the early part of the 1980s. But it was the unexpected, seemingly overnight success of Nirvana’s single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ in the fall of 1991, that made grunge a household word and launched an American music movement on a par with punk and hip-hop.

Twenty years later, Mark Yarm captures that era in the words of those at the forefront of the movement and its lesser-known champions. Everybody Loves Our Town will tell the whole story: the founding of originators like Soundgarden and the Melvins, the early successes of Seattle’s Sub Pop record label, the rise of powerhouses Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the insane media hype surrounding the grunge explosion, the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and finally, the genre’s mid-to-late-nineties decline.

Drawn from extensive interviews and featuring many rare and unseen photographs, Everybody Loves Our Town is at once a moving, lurid, funny and hugely insightful portrait of this extraordinary musical era.