Nirvana reached 6x Platinum in the UK with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on November 6, 2026. The BPI awards Platinum at 600,000 units for a single, putting the song’s latest threshold at 3.6 million UK units across sales and streaming. Its previous award came on May 9, 2025, when it reached 5x Platinum.
In 1991, British fans who wanted to take that opening riff home had a choice to make at the record shop. The UK seven inch paired an edit of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with the album version of “Drain You.” The CD single kept both songs and added “Even in His Youth” and “Aneurysm,” giving anyone who already owned Nevermind two tracks they couldn’t get on the album.
Some of the fans in the video had come straight from a different kind of Nirvana crowd. Two days before the shoot, flyers handed out at a Los Angeles show invited people to appear as high school students. On camera, they filled the bleachers for the pep rally that falls apart around the band.
In Britain, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” entered the singles chart at No. 9 on November 30, 1991, and hit its No. 7 peak a week later. One of its closest runs at that original peak came two decades afterward. On the final UK chart of 2011, the song reached No. 11, one place outside the Top 10.
