Herzeleid by Rammstein

Herzeleid, German for "heartache", was Rammstein's first album, released on Motor Music on September 25, 1995, by a Berlin six-piece barely a year old. The deal came with an instruction to find a producer, a job the band hadn't known existed, since East Germany didn't really do them; they floated Bob Rock and Rick Rubin, got told to aim lower, and ended up with Clawfinger's producer Jacob Hellner. The sessions, at Polar Studios and Hellner's own BomKrash in Stockholm, were a slog. With no language in common, the band couldn't tell Hellner what they hated about his sound until Dutch engineer Ronald Prent stepped in as go-between, and the first song alone took seven days.

What came out clanks and grinds, Till Lindemann barking his words over machinery the other five had already built, and the press had to coin a term for it: Neue Deutsche Härte. Sales were slow at first, but the live shows did the convincing, and it eventually climbed to number 6 in Germany.

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