Pretty on the Inside is the debut studio album by American alternative rock band Hole, released on September 17, 1991, in the United States on Caroline Records.

Upon release, Pretty on the Inside was well-received by alternative music critics, garnering favorable reviews that drew comparisons to the works of Black Sabbath and Patti Smith.

It was met with considerable commercial success in the United Kingdom, where the record's lead single, "Teenage Whore", entered the UK Indie Chart at number one in September 1991.

It has sold over 200,000 copies in the United States[5] and gained a contemporary cult following among punk rock fans, and has been cited as a seminal influence for songwriters and musicians such as Brody Dalle and Scout Niblett.

[6] Erlandson said that early in Hole's career, they were more interested in "making noise" than achieving success and before drummer Caroline Rue joined the band that they used no percussion whatsoever.

Early on, the band was most influenced by the New York No Wave art and music scene of the 1980s, which included visual artists, such as Richard Kern, as well as scuzz rock acts, such as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Sonic Youth, and Pussy Galore.

In the documentary film Not Bad for a Girl, Love, who had been in the erotic dancing industry for years prior, said that she worked as a stripper to help support the band in its early incarnation.

During the recording sessions for the album, Love purportedly gargled whiskey and excessively smoked cigarettes before takes to give a raw edge to her vocals.

[1][18] The album's sonic elements are heavily influenced by Los Angeles hardcore punk as well as New York's no wave scene; many of the tracks are accompanied by overt use of feedback, experimental playing, wah pedals, and use of sampling and interpolation.

[21] The album contains numerous musical references to other musicians and songs, specifically in "Sassy" and "Starbelly": The guitar riff featured in "Starbelly" is based on Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl"[22] and features analog cassette excerpts from "Rhiannon" by Fleetwood Mac[22] and an early recording of "Best Sunday Dress" by Pagan Babies, one of Love's earlier bands with Kat Bjelland; "Sassy" includes snippets from an angry message left by Nymphs singer Inger Lorre on Love's answering machine, accompanied by a singular chord progression repeated throughout.

[23][24] Love has admitted that the main riff to "Mrs. Jones" was copied verbatim from "Dark Entries" by the goth rock group Bauhaus, one of her favorite bands as a teenager.

She said that since the band was from Los Angeles, the "metal capital of the US", they thought they were making a "pop record with an edge", and were surprised by people's reactions when they were told it was violent and extreme.

"[8] In an interview with Spin magazine several years after its release, Love said that she was "posing in a lot of ways" with the album: "It was the truth, but it was also me catching up with all my hip peers who'd gone all indie on me, and who made fun of me for liking R.E.M.

[31] Hannah Levin of the Seattle publication The Stranger analyzed the lyrics to the track "Mrs. Jones", calling it a "particularly rattling sketch of what appears to be a rape scene, with Love seamlessly handling three perspectives: the ugly attacker ("Look into the bloodrot, you suicide bitch / It takes an hour with you to make me want to live"), the vengeful victim ("The abortion left an abscess / Don't ever talk to me like that again"), and the supportive narrator ("Just like a pro, she takes off her dress / And she kicks you down in her snow white pumps").

"[33] In spite of the album's graphic lyrics, though, the underlying female themes in many of its songs led some journalists to tag the band as being part of the riot grrl movement,[34] which Love was not directly associated with.

[35][36] The album artwork for Pretty on the Inside features a saturated pink press photo of the band amidst forest underbrush, taken by photographer Vickie Berndt.

[46][47] Los Angeles Times journalist David Cromelin noted in his review of the concert: Smashing Pumpkins' singer-guitarist Billy Corgan referred to himself as "a frustrated Midwestern youth" at the Whisky on Tuesday ...

The tortured, transfixing L.A. group's pairing with the headliners should have made this a bill to remember, but the audience was primed for Pumpkin and didn't take to Courtney Love's powerful howls of anguish.

According to Love, she tracked down original rolls of radiographic medical film from Denver, Colorado, that had been used in the Vietnam War, which the music video was then shot on, giving the images an X-ray-like appearance.

"[36] Simon Reynolds of The New York Times described the album as "a cauldron of negativity... [the band] grind[s] out torturous sound, vaguely redolent of Black Sabbath... Ms. Love's songs explore the full spectrum of female emotions, from vulnerability to rage.

"[60] Jonathan Gold of the Los Angeles Times similarly noted that the lyrics present "a terrifying emotional landscape, closer to Kathy Acker novels than to anything you might think of as pop" and praised Love's vocals as "astonishingly expressive" and ranging from "howling rage to the sort of sardonic sneer associated with the Fall’s Mark Smith...

"[61] LA Weekly's Lorraine Ali echoed a similar sentiment about the album's harsh nature, describing it as a "slithering nest of ugly thoughts and horrific admissions too intriguing to pass up.

"[65] Hannah Levin of the Seattle publication The Stranger praised the album's production by Gordon and Fleming, stating that "despite Pretty on the Inside's reputation as an unhinged, raw-sounding debut, a great deal of professional calculation went into putting this record together.

[28] In a 1994 article, Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke called the album "gloriously assaultive" and "a classic of sex-mad self-laceration, hypershred guitars and full-moon bawling ... in particular the spectacular goring of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" (aka "Clouds") at the end of the record.

74 in their "Top 99 Of '85–'95" list, noting that "Love works in extremes and wears that scarlet letter when she feels like it, and when she doesn't she rips it off, never neglecting melody and language as the real medium for her message.

"[67] Wendy Brandes of CNN, while reviewing Hole's third release, Celebrity Skin, in 1998, described Pretty on the Inside as "the musical equivalent of scrubbing one's eardrums with sandpaper".

"[52] Music historian Andrew Earles referred to the album as "brick-heavy...a crushing mix of Mudhoney at its finest, sludge-metal, Sonic Youth, and Love's terrifying but also moving vocal performance.

[69] Pretty on the Inside has had an influence on multiple alternative rock acts, being specifically mentioned by Spinnerette/The Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle in an interview as a seminal album in the development of her music.

[78] In a 2011 interview for Hit So Hard (2011), a documentary on later Hole drummer Patty Schemel, Love referred to Pretty on the Inside as "unlistenable",[20] going on to say: "That record was a calling card for rock critics and hardcorers, [saying] 'This is what I do, and I am not going to back down from it.

"[15] In October 2016, lead guitarist Eric Erlandson oversaw an orchestral live performance of the entire album in Los Angeles, entitled Pretty Looking Back.