Redneck Wonderland by Midnight Oil

Redneck Wonderland, Midnight Oil's tenth studio album, came out on Columbia in July 1998, and it's the sound of the Oils plugging into the late '90s and turning the amplifiers up. The title came from a scrap of graffiti on a wall, pictured in the promotional Oil Rag Vol. VI that went out with the album.

Peter Garrett is still bellowing out front, with Jim Moginie on guitar and keyboards, Martin Rotsey on guitar, Bones Hillman on bass and Rob Hirst on drums, but this time the band bolted electronic textures onto hard rock, and the results are harsh, jittery and furious, a long way from the wide-open spaces of their earlier hits. The title track, a snarling blast of a thing, became a fixture: it landed at number 93 on Triple M's "Ozzest 100" of the most Australian songs. The album went to number 7 on the ARIA chart and was finally certified gold in 2014.

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