Dreamtime by The Stranglers

Dreamtime, the Stranglers' ninth album, came out on Epic in 1986, and it's the old Guildford bruisers at their most polished, the snarl smoothed into sleek, sophisticated '80s pop. The classic four are all here, Hugh Cornwell on guitar and vocals, Jean-Jacques Burnel on bass, Dave Greenfield on keyboards and Jet Black on drums, and Greenfield's shimmering keys do a lot of the heavy lifting. The title track drew on the Dreamtime belief of Australia's Indigenous peoples.

"Always the Sun" is the jewel, a sighing, sunlit singalong with a wistful undertow, and it has outlasted everything else here. Four singles came off the album in Britain, "Nice in Nice", "Big in America" and "Shakin' Like a Leaf" among them, and a remix of "Was It You?" was readied as a fifth before it was shelved. It was the lowest-charting studio album of Cornwell's time in the band.

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