Angel Dust by Faith No More

Angel Dust, Faith No More's fourth album, came out on Slash and Reprise on June 8, 1992, and it's the sound of a band deliberately trying to shake off the funk-metal tag that The Real Thing had pinned on them. This time Mike Patton, who had been hired after the music for that record was already written, had a real hand in the songs, and the band went for something more theatrical. Matt Wallace produced.

It's a gloriously perverse record: Billy Gould and Mike Bordin lock down grooves heavy enough to dent concrete, Roddy Bottum's keyboards bring grandeur and menace, Jim Martin carves out metal riffs on what turned out to be his last album with the band, and Patton croons, shrieks and sneers through the lot. "Midlife Crisis" and "A Small Victory" led the way. In America it sold roughly 500,000 copies, a comedown, though it still became their only US top-ten album; elsewhere it outsold its predecessor, and at 2.5 million worldwide it's their biggest seller.

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