Hysteria by Def Leppard

Hysteria, Def Leppard's fourth album, came out on Mercury on 3 August 1987, and it took more than three years and a mountain of bad luck to make. The follow-up to their 1983 breakthrough Pyromania kept stalling, and then on 31 December 1984 drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm in a car accident. He stayed in the band, and he came up with the album's title himself, a nod to the crash, the amputation and the media storm that followed. The joke name "Trouble Up Mill", "Paranoia" and "Animal Instincts" were all floated and dropped along the way.

Robert John "Mutt" Lange produced it, his third and final album with them, and it's a wall of polished, stacked-up sound: layered vocals, huge drums and guitars buffed to a mirror shine, pop hooks welded to hard rock. Joe Elliott sings, Rick Savage plays bass, and Steve Clark and Phil Collen trade guitars. "Pour Some Sugar on Me" stomps and grinds, "Animal" and "Rocket" gleam, "Love Bites" slows to a smoldering power ballad, and "Armageddon It" and the dreamy title track keep it rolling. At 62 minutes and 32 seconds, it's the longest studio album they've made.

It was slow out of the gate beyond the faithful, then caught fire around the world, hitting number one in America and Britain, spinning off seven hit singles and selling more than 20 million copies, 12 million of them in the US. It remains their best seller. It was also Clark's last album before his death in 1991, though songs he co-wrote turned up on Adrenalize the following year.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.