Grace Under Pressure by Rush

Grace Under Pressure, Rush's tenth studio album, came out on Anthem on April 12, 1984, and it's the sound of a band cutting the cord. After the Signals tour wound down in mid-1983, Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart went back to work that August, but without Terry Brown, their producer since 1974. Finding a replacement who could commit took some doing, and in the end they made it with Peter Henderson.

Where Signals flirted with synthesizers, this one moves in with them. Lee's keyboards and bass carry much of the weight, Lifeson's guitar slashes and chimes in tighter, more angular shapes, and Peart plays like a man bolting down the hatches. It's cold, wired and a little paranoid, the Toronto trio's most modern-sounding record to that point. "Distant Early Warning", "Red Sector A" and "The Body Electric" show its range, from anthem to dread to machine-age pulse. It went to number 4 in Canada, 5 in the UK and 10 on the Billboard 200, and went platinum in the U.S.

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