Commercial Suicide: Def Leppard, Slang, and the Album That Refused to Be Hysteria
In May 1996, the band that had built one of the most commercially perfect rock albums of the 1980s deliberately stopped making music that sounded like that album. They wrote in a Spanish house. They produced themselves without Mutt Lange for the first time in sixteen years. They cited Soundgarden's Superunknown as inspiration. They jokingly called the album Commercial Suicide while they were making it. They were not, in retrospect, joking. A long play on the album that broke Def Leppard's platinum streak and which the band continues to defend as one of the most important records they ever made.
By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 14 min read