Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers

Californication, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' seventh studio album, came out on Warner Bros. in June 1999 with Rick Rubin producing, and it's the record where the band put its shirt back on. The key was John Frusciante, back on guitar for the first time since Mother's Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and his return shifted the whole band's sound toward something softer, more melodic and more reflective.

The funk is still there, but it's been slowed down and opened up. The innuendo the Chili Peppers were known for hasn't gone anywhere, but it now shares the lyric sheet with death, suicide, drugs, travel, globalization and the state of California itself. "Scar Tissue" is spare and sun-bleached, Frusciante's guitar doing more with a handful of notes than most players manage with a whole solo. "Otherside" is haunted and hooky, the title track broods and glimmers, while "Around the World" and "Parallel Universe" bring back the jolt and the thunder, and "Road Trippin'" drifts off into the haze.

It became the band's biggest-selling studio album: more than 17 million copies worldwide, more than eight million of them in the US, with a peak of number three on the Billboard 200. "Scar Tissue" won a Grammy, and critics heard something spiritual in it that the band had never quite reached before. It was a real change of style, and it stuck.

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