Celebrity Skin by Hole

Celebrity Skin, Hole's third album, arrived on September 8, 1998, on DGC in America and Geffen everywhere else, and it's the sound of Courtney Love trading the scorched-earth noise of Pretty on the Inside and Live Through This for sun-bleached, radio-ready California rock. Producer Michael Beinhorn worked the band over nine months in Los Angeles, New York and London, and the result gleams.

The lineup was Love on guitar and lead vocals, Eric Erlandson on guitar and Melissa Auf der Maur on bass, in her only studio album with the band. Patty Schemel drummed on the demos, but at Beinhorn's urging session man Deen Castronovo played on the record instead, a decision that split Schemel from the band. Billy Corgan co-wrote the music on five songs, and Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go's and Auf der Maur's old bandmate Jordon Zadorozny helped on one more.

Love wrote every lyric. The band had started out in 1997 planning a California album, and the whole thing is soaked in that state: the glamour, the rot, the water, with drowning motifs running through it. The title track, named after a poem of Love's that drew on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, slams in on a riff like a sunburn and topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart; "Malibu" glides like a wave breaking in slow motion, and "Awful" is sweet and sour at once.

It became Hole's biggest record, reaching number nine on the Billboard 200 and selling more than 1.4 million copies in the US, and critics loved it. It was also their last album before the band broke up in 2002.

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