Hole’s Celebrity Skin gets the Sunday reappraisal it always deserved

Hole’s Celebrity Skin gets the Sunday Review treatment on 14 June, and it remains one of those albums that refuses to sit quietly in a tidy legacy box. Released in 1998, the record was often reduced to a story about Courtney Love’s Hollywood makeover, Billy Corgan’s co-writing involvement and arguments about authenticity, as if shine automatically cancelled out danger. The reappraisal is useful because Celebrity Skin has always been more complicated than the sellout headline. It is an album about fame, exploitation, grief, beauty, authorship and the machinery that devours women while asking them to smile better for the cameras. The guitars gleam, but the emotional centre is full of ash. For indie and alternative readers in 2026, the lesson is still sharp: polish can be a weapon too, especially when the person holding it knows exactly who has been pointing blades at her.

Source: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hole-celebrity-skin