With the Lights Out
2004 compilation box set by Nirvana
With the Lights Out is a box set by the American rock band Nirvana, released on November 23, 2004. It contains three CDs and one DVD of previously rare or unreleased material, including B-sides, demos, and rehearsal and live recordings. The title comes from the lyrics of Nirvana's 1991 single "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
With the Lights Out was planned for release in 2001, but was delayed by a legal battle with Courtney Love, the widow of Nirvana singer, Kurt Cobain. As of 2016, it had sold 546,000 copies in the US.
Background
Rumors of a posthumous Nirvana anthology surfaced in the mid-1990s, not long after the death of the singer and guitarist, Kurt Cobain, in April 1994. It was reported in Kerrang! in April 1999 that the surviving Nirvana members, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, were planning a box set to be released in 2000 at the earliest. It was later announced that a 45-track box set would be released in September 2001, to mark the 10th anniversary of the band's breakthrough album, Nevermind, but it was delayed by a legal battle with Cobain's widow, Courtney Love.
Much of the dispute centered on the unreleased song "You Know You're Right", recorded in January 1994 during the band's final studio session. Grohl and Novoselic wanted it for the box set, but Love blocked its release and sued them for control of Nirvana's legacy.
“With the Lights Out” enters the record as 2004 compilation box set by Nirvana. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lights, compilation and Nirvana can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1140480. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004, 1991, 2001 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “With the Lights Out” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.