Sunny Day Real Estate couldn’t have known how quickly things would happen for them. “We were just going into a basement to jam,” lead vocalist Jeremy Enigk tells Apple Music, 30 years after the release of the Seattle rock outfit’s landmark debut, Diary. “And the next thing I know, we’re a band. And we’ve signed with Sub Pop after just our second show. I didn’t have time to process it, or even desire it.” Originally a trio—drummer William Goldsmith, guitarist Dan Hoerner, bassist Nate Mendel—who’d played under various names, they invited a then 18-year-old Enigk to jam with them while Mendel was away on tour with another band, just for fun. They began playing every day, often for long, six-hour stretches, pausing only to eat. They were making music that sounded vast and vulnerable, delicate yet heavy—unlike anything else in hardcore, let alone a Seattle that had upended the music and fashion industry with grunge. When Mendel returned home, their lineup was complete. “We came from hardcore, so it was interesting to sort of experiment with melody and storytelling as opposed to screaming and protest,” Goldsmith says of those early jam sessions, which yielded much of said debut. “Jeremy added a whole new dimension.” Enigk originally sang in a falsetto before injuring his voice while wailing onstage as the band toured their way to Chicago to record Diary in 1993. As a result, his vocals are literally wounded here, giving each song heightened emotional stakes that feel immediate and real, despite his voice sounding so otherworldly at times. You can hear it in the opening lines of “Seven,” like he’s levitating somewhere above a storm of guitar and drums. You can feel the anguish of “In Circles” and “The Blankets Were the Stairs” without ever laying eyes on a lyric sheet. “I needed to sing the way that I sing,” he says. “I had a broken heart. I needed to get it out emotionally. I needed to pour that experience into the songs and bring all of that chaos and pain into order so that I could sort of compartmentalize it and set it aside.” When the album was released in May of 1994—just a month after Kurt Cobain’s death—it was met with widespread praise. But in Cobain’s absence, some portion of the music industry looked to Enigk as a potential successor, an artist whose raw delivery and natural intensity might resonate with mainstream audiences in a similarly powerful way. The heightened expectations weren’t helpful. “I was told multiple times that we were going to carry the torch after he passed away,” Enigk says. “And I didn’t want that, didn’t want the pressure, didn’t want fame. And at a certain point, for various reasons, I set it down. I walked away.” The band would break up, temporarily, less than a year later. And while they didn’t fill the void left by Nirvana—though Goldsmith and Mendel would join drummer Dave Grohl’s new project Foo Fighters that same year—Diary would make them reluctant giants to a mid-’90s emo scene that was just beginning to find itself. From the start, Sunny Day Real Estate had eluded easy categorization, but the sound they’d discovered together in that basement in Seattle—the melodic grandeur, the longing, the cliff’s edge performances—offered a blueprint to a wealth of bands who were also looking beyond hardcore. “There’s no way we could have forced ourselves into some box,” Hoerner says. “We all loved hardcore, we all love punk rock, but the thing that we made is the thing that it had to be. We would never have called ourselves ‘emo.’ But I’ve learned to just embrace it. Someone thinking of us as an influence on their music—I honestly can’t think of a more heartfelt compliment. It’s better than being utterly forgotten.”