Artist · chart history · #216 in alternative artist polls
Faith No More
Band San Francisco United States Active 1983–2021
Faith No More formed in 1983 in San Francisco, United States and was active until 2021. Faith No More has 189 chart appearances on 139 radio countdowns from 43 stations on RockLists, spanning 1987–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Epic”, which appears on 109 lists with a best position of #6. The station that charted Faith No More most often is KROQ (Los Angeles, CA), with 24 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1990.
Faith No More knocked around San Francisco as Sharp Young Men and then Faith. No Man. before settling on the name by September 1983, and the engine room was in place early: Billy Gould on bass, Mike Bordin on drums and Roddy Bottum on keyboards, with Jim Martin's guitar arriving in 1984. Singers came and went in a hurry, Courtney Love and Paula Frazer among the short-lived ones, until Chuck Mosley took the microphone for the first 2 albums, We Care a Lot in 1985 and Introduce Yourself in 1987. The title track of the debut is a lurching, big-bottomed stomp that already sounds like nobody else in town.
Mosley was out in 1988, Mike Patton was in, and The Real Thing, in 1989, was the breakthrough: platinum sales, with "Epic" climbing to number 9 in the US. It is a glorious collision of a record, Bordin and Gould locked into a heavy groove, Bottum's keyboards laying on the pomp, Martin's guitar crunching like pure metal, and Patton over the top of it all, chattering, crooning and yowling as if he could not decide what kind of singer to be and saw no reason he should have to. "Falling to Pieces" kept the momentum rolling.
Angel Dust, in 1992, went stranger and darker and still went gold, with "Midlife Crisis" and "A Small Victory" on board, and their deadpan cover of the Commodores' "Easy", from the Songs to Make Love To EP, turned into a hit across Australia and Europe. Martin left in 1993; Trey Spruance and then Dean Menta filled in before Jon Hudson took the job in 1996. King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime came in 1995 and Album of the Year in 1997, with "Last Cup of Sorrow" and "Ashes to Ashes", and in 1998, 6 albums in, they called it quits.
They came back in 2009 for The Second Coming Tour, and Sol Invictus, in 2015, was their first record in 18 years. A tour planned for 2020 was knocked off course by the COVID-19 pandemic and then scrapped because of Patton's mental health, and the band went quiet again, though in June 2026 Gould confirmed plans to hit the road in 2027. On the countdowns, "Epic" still hits hardest, with "We Care a Lot" and "Midlife Crisis" close behind.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Faith No More on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Epic#173 of all time | 109 | #6 | – | 1990 | |
| 2 | We Care A Lot | 33 | #29 | – | 1987 | |
| 3 | Midlife Crisis | 19 | #12 | – | 1992 | |
| 4 | Falling to Pieces | 5 | #40 | – | 1990 | |
| 5 | Easy | 3 | #62 | – | 1993 | |
| 6 | Ashes To Ashes | 2 | #31 | – | 1997 | |
| 7 | A Small Victory | 6 | #61 | – | 1992 | |
| 8 | Last Cup of Sorrow | 2 | #19 | – | 1997 | |
| 9 | Evidence | 1 | #29 | – | 1995 | |
| 10 | Superhero | 1 | #50 | – | 2015 | |
| 11 | Stripsearch | 1 | #64 | – | 1997 | |
| 12 | Digging the Grave | 1 | #91 | – | 1995 | |
| 13 | From Out Of Nowhere | 1 | #910 | – | – | |
| 14 | I Started A Joke | 1 | #846 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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