The "Sliver" single was first released on 7-inch vinyl in the US in 1990 by Sub Pop. The initial run of 3,000 copies was pressed on black, marbled blue, or clear pink vinyl. It was released on
CD single, 7-inch vinyl and 12-inch vinyl in the UK in 1991 on the Tupelo record label, and peaked at number 90 on the UK Singles Chart. Noted music photographer
Charles Peterson provided black and white photography. The single charted at number 23 in Ireland in 1992, due to the success of the band's second album,
Nevermind, released in September 1991. Following its re-release on
Incesticide in December 1992, the song was sent to radio and reached number 19 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart in early 1993. The "Sliver" single re-charted at number 77 on the UK Singles Chart in December 1992, due to the release of
Incesticide. The
Incesticide and CD single versions omitted a phone conversation between a hungover Novoselic and Sub Pop co-founder
Jonathan Poneman that appears at the end of the song in the vinyl single. The exchange, which ended with a confused-sounding Novoselic advising Poneman to call back later that day, was accidentally recorded on Novoselic's answering machine. The single was re-released on silver 7-inch vinyl on 26 March 2021 by Jackpot Records and it is limited to 1,000 copies.
Posthumous success In August 2024, the "Sliver" single entered the UK Official Vinyl Singles chart at number 39 and the UK Official Physical Singles chart at number 53, marking the band's first appearance on either chart. In March 2025, it made its second appearance on the latter chart, reentering at number 98.
Critical reception Reviewing the single in a 1990 issue of
Melody Maker,
Everett True wrote, "Sure, the vocals are lazily throat splitting, the guitars belligerently grungy, the bass up and out of place . . . but check the melodies, damn fools, check the melodies. The only reason this isn't 'Single Of The Week' is because three even mightier singles were released this week."
Legacy In a July 2018 retrospective review of
Incesticide, Jenny Pelly of
Pitchfork wrote that "Sliver" was "a hilarious caricature" of a pop song that featured "the exaggerated naivete and cool simplicity of
Olympia bands that Cobain loved, like Beat Happening and
the Go Team. In 2011,
NME ranked the song at number nine on their list of the 10 best Nirvana songs. In 2015,
Rolling Stone placed it at number three on their ranking of 102 Nirvana songs. In 2020, it was ranked at number one on ''
Kerrang!'s "The 20 Greatest Nirvana Songs - Ranked" list, with Sam Law calling it "a finely-balanced moment in time, powered by the frontman’s tortured intelligence but not yet corrupted by the anguish and addiction that would eventually spell his demise." In 2023, Stephen Thomas Erlewine ranked it seventh in the A.V. Club's'' "Essential Nirvana: Their 30 greatest songs, ranked" list.
Rivers Cuomo, of the American alternative rock band
Weezer, cited "Sliver" as the song that made the biggest impact on his life in his early 20s, and shared his memory of hearing it for the first time in a 2015
Pitchfork interview: "It was just one of those things where, by the time it got through the first chorus, I was just running around the store ... [It] had the simplicity of the
Velvet Underground in the structure and the chords ... [and] the melody and the major chord progression of the pop music I love, like
ABBA, but also this sense of destructiveness ... and it came out in this new hybrid style." In 2022,
Paris Jackson paid homage to the
music video for "Sliver" with the music video for her song "Lighthouse" which was filmed in a similar setting and also included a picture of Kurt Cobain. ==Music video==