Gift by Taproot

Gift, Taproot's debut album, landed on Atlantic on June 27, 2000, a year after the Ann Arbor, Michigan band signed with the label. Ulrich Wild produced it, and the lineup was the original one: Stephen Richards singing and playing guitar, Mike DeWolf on guitar, Phil Lipscomb on bass and Jarrod Montague on drums.

It's nu metal at its most wound-up, all detuned churn, lurching grooves and Richards swinging from a pained murmur to a full-throated roar in the space of a bar. "Again & Again" and "I" were the singles, and both got modest traction on rock radio, "I" climbing to number 34 on the Mainstream Rock chart. The record went on to sell more than 250,000 copies, enough to set the table for Welcome, the 2002 album that finally broke them.

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