Toto

Toto started in Los Angeles in 1977 as a band of studio pros: David Paich on keyboards and Jeff Porcaro on drums had played together on plenty of other people's records before they built their own, recruiting David Hungate on bass, Steve Lukather on guitar, Steve Porcaro on keyboards and Bobby Kimball on vocals. That session-room polish is all over their sound, a slick blend of pop, rock, soul, funk, prog and jazz that never plays a note out of place. Their debut album and its single "Hold the Line" brought them to mainstream attention, and a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist followed in 1979.

Toto IV made them global. "Africa" is the one everybody knows, airy keyboards and rolling, layered percussion wrapped around a chorus big enough to fill a stadium, and it went all the way to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Hungate left before the album came out, and Mike Porcaro took over bass.

The lineup kept shifting after that, with Fergie Frederiksen and Joseph Williams among the singers who followed Kimball, and Simon Phillips stepping in after Jeff Porcaro's death in 1992. They have sold over 50 million records, were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2009, and wrapped up their studio career with Old Is New in 2018.

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