Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear walked the Peacock Theater carpet together Sunday night, three decades after the band first shaped MTV's biggest stage.
Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear showed up together on the carpet at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday night, ahead of the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards. The occasion: Nirvana picking up the Video Vanguard Award, MTV's honor for artists whose work has left a permanent mark on the culture.
The network confirmed the award back on September 9, a date chosen deliberately. It marked 34 years to the day since Nirvana first played the VMAs stage, a performance that, depending on who you ask, either announced grunge to a mainstream audience or just confirmed what college radio already knew.
The band's story starts in 1987, when Krist Novoselic and the late Kurt Cobain put it together. Grohl came in three years later, and it's his drumming most people associate with the band's commercial peak. Pat Smear's connection runs differently. He joined the touring lineup in 1993, playing guitar and singing backing vocals through 1994, and he's been part of every reunion performance since. Sunday's red carpet appearance keeps that streak alive.
Three studio albums is the entire official discography here. Bleach. Nevermind. In Utero. That's it. Cobain's death in 1994 closed the book on new material, which makes tonight's honor less about a comeback and more about a body of work that's stayed in rotation for over three decades without needing a fourth record to justify it.
A crowded night at the Peacock Theater
Nirvana wasn't the only act getting a career-spanning nod. Taylor Swift is receiving the MTV VMA Artist Director Honors this year, and she's also set to premiere the music video for "Patient Zero" during the broadcast, so the telecast is doing double duty as tribute show and release event.
Snoop Dogg is hosting, which tells you something about the tone producers are going for, somewhere between reverence and a party. The show airs live on CBS starting at 7:30pm ET, with the usual mix of performers and presenters filling out the runtime around the award segments.
What nobody's confirmed yet is whether Grohl, Novoselic and Smear will do more than accept a trophy and say a few words. Reunion performances have happened before at similar ceremonies, but nothing beyond the award announcement has been made official for tonight. If there's a live moment coming, it'll happen on the broadcast itself, not before it. For now, the carpet reunion is the story, and the band's presence together in one frame after all this time is doing plenty of the talking on its own.
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