Floored by Sugar Ray

Floored, Sugar Ray's second album, came out on Atlantic on June 24, 1997, and it's the record where the Newport Beach band's heavy, funk-metal thrash ran into the breezy hit that changed everything. David Kahne produced, and it was the first album with DJ Homicide as an official member, alongside Mark McGrath, Rodney Sheppard, Stan Frazier and Murphy Karges.

"Fly" is the one: a sun-baked, reggae-tinged shuffle that shows up in two versions here, one of them featuring reggae artist Super Cat. Its success steered the band toward the sunny, radio-friendly pop they'd chase from then on, while the follow-up single, "RPM", made less of a splash. Plenty of the rest still leans on the nu-metal crunch of their early days, which makes Floored a snapshot of a band caught mid-turn.

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