Nirvana's acoustic "Unplugged" set, which was released posthumously as an album in 1994, may have provided a hint of Cobain's future musical direction. The record has drawn comparisons to R.E.M.'s 1992 release, "Automatic for the People", and in 1993, Cobain predicted that the next Nirvana album would be "pretty ethereal, acoustic, like R.E.M.'s last album". Pat Smear stated in a 2013 interview that he also knew where Cobain's musical direction was headed, stating "I know where he was looking to go at that time. I think that he was looking to do the opposite of In Utero. Not polished, but soft. Not far as "MTV Unplugged" but definitely less noise. I think he got, everybody got, their noisy stuff out of their system, really."