It was a gamble and they knew it. In 1995, during the recording of Def Leppard’s sixth album, Slang, it had a bleakly humorous working title: Commercial Suicide. “We knew that people would wonder what the hell we were doing,” singer Joe Elliott says. “But we couldn’t make another album like Adrenalize. We had to do something else. So we did something that nobody expected. Slang was our grown-up album.”
A change in Def Leppard’s music had begun with the 1993 album Retro Active, the follow-up to Adrenalize. The sound of it was leaner, harder, less slick: partly in reaction to Adrenalize, which was, in guitarist Phil Collen’s words, “a little mechanical”; and partly in reaction to how music was developing in the early ’90s, as alternative rock had a seismic effect akin to the punk explosion of 1977, the year in which Def Leppard formed.
