La Folie by The Stranglers

La Folie, the Stranglers' sixth album, came out on Liberty, an EMI label, on 9 November 1981, at a moment when the band that had once outsold the rest of Britain's punk and new wave crowd was watching its luck run thin. So they went for the charts on purpose. The band co-produced with engineer Steve Churchyard, and EMI had Tony Visconti mix every track as if it might be a single.

The title is French for madness, the madness of love to be exact, and each song pokes at a different kind of it, from the title track, drawn from the story of Issei Sagawa, to the opener Hugh Cornwell insisted was really called "Non Stop Nun" before the label trimmed it. The classic four are all present: Cornwell on guitar and vocals, Jean-Jacques Burnel on bass and vocals, Dave Greenfield on keyboards and Jet Black on drums. And then there's "Golden Brown", a woozy, lilting oddity that handed them a major mainstream hit in 1982.

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