The worst R.E.M album, according to Mike Mills
Most rock bands fail to remain together for the long haul, let alone on top form for multiple decades. It seems that, over time, it is exceedingly difficult to maintain creative energy and critical acclaim. With this in mind, it is impressive that R.E.M managed to maintain commercial and critical attention for two decades while satiating their sprawling creative desires. In terms of intrepid artistry and widespread, long-lived appeal, R.E.M draw up close to their British pals Radiohead.
Led by the distinctive nasal vocals of Michael Stipe, R.E.M made several genre excursions during their three-decade run as a recording act. After pioneering a heavy country-inspired rock sound in their revelatory debut album, Murmur, in 1983, R.E.M evolved their sound through a run of early alt-rock releases that, alongside the work of artists like Pixies and Sonic Youth, countered the synth-pop tendencies of the time and portended the imminent grunge wave.
In the early 1990s, grunge icon Kurt Cobain listed his all-time favourite albums. Among his 50 favourites was R.E.M’s 1988 classic Green. “I don’t know how that band does what they do,” Cobain told the Rolling Stone editor David Fricke in 1994. “God, they’re the greatest. They’ve dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music.”
Highlight tracks on Green like ‘Stand’ and ‘Orange Crush’ spoke to Cobain’s heavy rock sensibilities as displayed in his work with Nirvana. However, he was also transfixed by the band’s continued evolution heading into the 1990s. The 1992 album Automatic for the People was the start of a new chapter for the band, marked by newfound maturity in Stipe’s lyrics and a more melancholy, eclectic sound palette.
The 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi, though less iconic, is celebrated for a similarly diverse, existential and progressive outlook. At around this point, Radiohead entered the scene with the success of their second album, The Bends, behind them and OK Computer in the crosshairs. Radiohead and R.E.M first met in 1995 when the latter invited the former to open for them on the European leg of their Monster tour.
Stipe and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke became particularly close over the late 1990s, with Yorke joining R.E.M to perform Patti Smith’s duet parts in live renditions of ‘E-Bow the Letter’. Stipe, who had overcome the initial pressures of fame in the 1980s, offered Yorke his counsel during a tough period following the success of OK Computer. He told the Radiohead singer to repeat to himself, “I’m not here/This isn’t happening” in times of stress, a line that became the centrepiece of ‘How to Disappear Completely’, one of Radiohead’s most beloved songs on the audacious post-rock album Kid A.
Stipe and R.E.M’s influence on Kid A goes a little deeper than ‘How to Disappear Completely’, too. When Kid A hit the shelves in 2000, it received a deserved warm critical reception as an unprecedented blend of experimental electro and alt-rock. York was influenced by artists like Autechre, Aphex Twin and Squarepusher when taking this bold step, but the influence of R.E.M’s electro-tinged 1998 album, Up, can’t be overstated.
Up is among R.E.M’s most adventurous albums, worthy of respect as an innovative reaction to losing drummer Bill Berry, whose 1997 retirement necessitated the embrace of drum machines. Following Berry’s departure, R.E.M began to lose momentum, with fans divided on their final five albums, from Up to 2011’s Collapse into Now.
Appraising R.E.M’s more recent albums in a 2023 interview with Vulture, multi-instrumentalist Mike Mills declared that, despite its lukewarm reception, 2001’s Revival was up there with the group’s classic releases. “I think our hidden gem is Reveal,” he said. “There’s some true beauty on that record. It’s not a rock record per se, but it’s a beautiful music record. It’s the one that might best reward a further look. It’s supposed to feel like summer.”
Mills appreciates, however, that R.E.M began to run out of steam after Reveal and cited 2004’s Around the Sun as the nadir. “People think Around the Sun is our weakest, and I would agree,” Mills told Jeff Tamarkin in 2011. “But not because of the songs. The songs are good. What happened was we tried to do too much. We stopped and did a greatest hits record, we did a tour and then tried to finish the record. That was a disservice to the songs because it made it hard for us to focus.”
Despite being commercially successful and hitting number one on the UK Albums Chart, Around the Sun was a shadow of R.E.M’s former glory. As Mills pointed out, some of the songs are truly inspired, with compelling lyrical ideas, but the LP fell short in execution. As a collection, there is very little coherence; compositionally, much more could have been done to elevate the tracks. “It’s not on [producer] Pat McCarthy,” Mills added in The Story Of R.E.M “It’s on us; we just lost our groove.”
