Floodland by Sisters of Mercy

Floodland, the Sisters of Mercy's second album, came out in 1987 on Merciful Release, and it's basically Andrew Eldritch alone in a flooded cathedral of his own making. After Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams left to form the Mission, he wrote the songs in Hamburg, a city whose water seeped into both the title and the lyrics, then played every instrument himself, programmed the drum machine Doktor Avalanche and pieced the whole thing together on sequencers. Patricia Morrison was in the band but adds only backing vocals.

Jim Steinman produced "This Corrosion" and "Dominion"/"Mother Russia", and you can tell: melodrama piled to the rafters. Larry Alexander co-produced the rest with Eldritch. The lyrics watch a world slowly rotting, with Chernobyl and the Cold War lurking in the shadows. "This Corrosion" hit number 7 in the UK, and critics who shrugged at first now hail the album as a gothic rock landmark.

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