One Hot Minute by Red Hot Chili Peppers

One Hot Minute, the sixth Red Hot Chili Peppers album, came out on Warner Bros. on September 12, 1995, and it's the sound of the band trying to find its footing after the ground moved. Blood Sugar Sex Magik had been a smash, and guitarist John Frusciante, uneasy with all that fame, walked out in the middle of a tour in 1992. After a string of stopgap guitarists, they landed Dave Navarro, late of Jane's Addiction, in 1993, and this would be his only studio album with them. Rick Rubin produced again, at the Sound Factory in Hollywood, from June 1994 to February 1995.

Navarro pulls the band away from the slap-happy funk of the last record toward heavier, thicker riffs and swirls of psychedelic guitar, and you can hear the change in the dense, lurching churn of "Warped". Anthony Kiedis had slipped back into drug addiction in 1994 after more than five years clean, and his lyrics turn inward, dwelling on drugs and the damage they do; the mood is mostly dark and melancholy. "My Friends" is a gentle, aching lament, "Aeroplane" is the most buoyant thing here, and Flea steps up to sing lead on "Pea" and the tail end of "Deep Kick", while Chad Smith keeps it all nailed down.

It went to number four on the Billboard 200 and multi-platinum, with more than two million sold, but it moved less than half as many copies as Blood Sugar Sex Magik and never matched it with critics. Navarro was fired in 1998 over his drug use, and Frusciante came back not long after.

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