Extreme

Extreme came together in Boston in 1985, with Gary Cherone, Nuno Bettencourt, Pat Badger and Paul Geary at the core, and their self-titled 1989 debut, with "Kid Ego", laid out a flashy, funked-up hard rock that sat somewhere between glam metal swagger and a Saturday night funk party.

The breakthrough came with their second album, Extreme II: Pornograffitti (A Funked Up Fairy Tale), in 1990. It's all hard, strutting riffs, slap-happy grooves and a flair for the theatrical, but the song that broke them wide open was the one that sounds nothing like the rest: "More Than Words", a hushed acoustic ballad that went all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album climbed to number 10 on the Billboard 200 and went gold in May 1991, then double platinum in October 1992. The Extragraffitti EP brought "Decadence Dance", a fast, funk-metal workout.

They became one of the biggest rock acts of the early '90s, selling more than 10 million albums worldwide, and later stretched out into alternative metal and grunge on Waiting for the Punchline in 1995. Mike Mangini had a spell in the band in the mid-'90s, and Kevin Figueiredo has been aboard since 2007.

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