The 1996 album Michael Stipe called his greatest work: “Absolutely my favourite”
It took them long enough, but by 1996, REM were pretty much the biggest band on the planet.
There was a whole lifetime behind them. Founded back in 1980, REM were the slow, simmering regional stars of the Athens, Georgia, indie underground, sharing a jangly punk proximity with the likes of The Replacements or the softer end of Hüsker Dü.
By the end of the decade, five albums and a growing national presence won a signing with Warner Bros and a leading name of the brewing alternative rock scene threatening the hair metal heyday from below.
But it was the 1990s that saw REM catapulted from indie heroes to bona fide pop A-listers. The band’s career is essentially boiled down to pre and post ‘Losing My Religion’, the lead single to 1991’s Out of Time, that assured their mainstream trajectory from then on, carrying the quartet some distance and triggering the classic LP run. Fans may disagree as to when the golden era began to ebb, but consensus typically agrees that 1996 was the last time REM hit a home run, no less than the frontman himself.
“New Adventures in Hi-Fi is absolutely my favourite record of ours, most definitely as a four-piece,” Michael Stipe revealed in 2023 on the Kyle Meredith With… series. Before plumbing for REM’s tenth studio album, the former frontman shed light on the surrounding circumstances of its burnishing and how it shaped the album’s biting character.
“We were in this hyper-adrenalised state, being on tour and performing every night or every other night, and you feel that in the music,” he added. “It creates this bristling landscape for me, to people, with the narrative arcs and the characters that I invented, it remains my favourite…”
A lot of long-standing alchemy was to see its last shine on New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Founding drummer Bill Berry would call it quits not long after, original manager Jefferson Holt would depart, and the sessions would mark the final studio time with producer Scott Litt. Flux was in the air. Such a transitional glow is also likely due to its novel recording practices, with half the album captured live on four tracks and dressed up at Seattle’s Bad Animals studio.
Coupled with the road themes that travel throughout, and illustrated starkly by Stipe’s front cover photo of the US Route 95 in Nevada, a sense of motion from one chapter can’t be shaken off New Adventures in Hi-Fi’s experimental jangle.
Such an ephemeral yet nocturnal atmosphere would glow distinctly in the REM oeuvre. Stipe confessed “a soft spot in my heart” for 2001’s Reveal, and even suggested it shares the premier top spot of his internal album rankings with their 1996 effort, but New Adventures in Hi-Fi scores an REM at their most unabashed.
Buoyed by the eerie ‘E-Bow the Letter’ with Patti Smith and the delicate ‘Electrolite’, Out of Time may stand as the moment REM conquered the world, but New Adventures in Hi-Fi would kickstart their slow demise just as they had inched toward fame across another five albums, calling it a day in 2011.
