That’s the one thing it’s still the same subject matter but with a 20 year on perspective. During the time of Britpop people would say how can you still be angry when you are 30? and I would reply ‘how can you not?’ When I was as growing up people left home at 19 and married the girl down the road and then you see them again at 35 two timing their wives, an alcoholic and you wonder about all the great advice they gave you about the lyrics. There is still also a lot of literature that comes into the lyrics and also we just see what is around us and the frustration and how we fit into the world and how people fit in with eachother and that’s what drives the songs at the moment.’ Michael: I didn't know it either. I just thought it was just a cool line. Then obviously I heard it later, and it was something I'd obviously heard before, but it hadn't really sunk in. The Bowie version had been around forever, but I hadn’t consciously heard it, if you know what I mean. The band's ninth album included What's The Frequency Kenneth?, Crush With Eyeliner and Michael Stipe's tribute to Kurt Cobain, Let Me In. The Bristol trip hop collective released their debut album, which included Sour Times, and Glory Box.

The Therapy? main man couldn’t resist looking at some of the recent comments on social media about the record. “What I'm proud of, more than anything else, is the amount of people saying that it either inspired them to form a band, play an instrument, or saying things like 'this got me through a really hard time'. Do you listen to all these influences anyway or do you specifically listen to them to push yourselves? Top 10 Sales in Europe" (PDF). Music & Media. 26 February 1994. p.16 . Retrieved 22 September 2023. Michael: There's a lot that we all felt really good playing, and I know Knives is one of those ones. Just dynamically it all made sense, even before there'd been any vocals or lyrics on it. And when we did the original demo, I thought, 'Oh my god, this is going to be fantastic.' It was just screaming out to be the album's opener.

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Andy: I had the riff before I was even part of the band. I'd written it, I think, when I was 16 or 17, on bass. In the various bands I'd been in I'd never had the chance to use it. When we wrote a song called SWT, it was a riff at the end. We recorded that in a studio in Lurgan. The guy had a Fender Twin and I was completely obsessed with Bob Mould's guitar tone. I said, 'Look: here's the closest I can get to Bob Mould. Can you help me out with this?' I always thought, 'This riff doesn't go on enough.' I'm a bit of a pop guy; I always think if you've got something really melodic it should feature prominently at least a couple of times. People thought Troublegum had come out of nowhere, but all we’d known was hard work,” says Andy. “We had done two world tours that year, so we’d put in the legwork.” That short vinegary burst of hatred that makes you hold grudges were too wearing though so I let that go but there is still enough vitriol in my system.

With hindsight, Ewing's departure seems to be imprinted within the grooves of Infernal Love. Not only is he lower in the mix, his playing seems far less expressive, strangely muted, already disillusioned perhaps. Ewing quit the group during the Infernal Love tour, fearing that if he didn't he would "go mad". He then disappeared into obscurity, depriving the world of one its most exciting young drummers.
Incidentally, you can keep What's The Story, The Bends, and that Sparklehorse album with the clown on the front. The best album of 1995 (and second best album of the 90s) was Infernal Love. Dr Victkurt Cobainstein dealt with the unsettling success of his second album by doing too much heroin, hitching a lift on Captain Albini's expeditionary ship, pursuing his Nevermind monster to a mansion in the North Pole hoping to slay it with nothing but a borrowed shotgun and a copy of In Utero, before slipping tragically under the ice. Andy Cairns dealt with the unsettling success of his second album by taking lots of cocaine, shaving his head, investing in false moustaches, and making a bizarre goth-pop album in Peter Gabriel's recording studio. We’d already done our apprenticeship on the major label with Nurse, and we sort of learned the mistakes that we shouldn’t make with this one; like, not to take acid and run around in a field full of cows, and or not to take speed and get into fist fights. We worked with Chris Sheldon who was a really up-and-coming producer at the time, and he’d already worked on the Screamager single with us. I remember him saying, ‘This is a real step-up for Therapy? People will be singing this and it could go into the charts. Have you got any other stuff like this?’ We had a bunch of songs that were inspired by the Ulster punk of Stiff Little Fingers, but also by Helmet and Metallica, which were bands we also loved. We played him Nowhere and Die Laughing and he said, ‘Guys, these are all singles.’ At that time people knew us for songs like Teethgrinder and Potato Junkie; we’d only written one song in the five years we’d been together that was poppy and it became a top ten single. So writing a whole album that was complimentary to Screamager was a big risk. But Sheldon said, ‘You’ve got the songs there. Why don’t you give it a go?’ So we did. Find sources: "Troublegum"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( October 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Is that why you did some of the things you did, like purposefully not making Troublegum 2 and adding cellos to Infernal Love? If someone said, ‘I don’t like the record, it’s crap’ – fair enough. But if someone said, ‘I don’t like the record because this Irish guy has got a s**t beard – that’s a bit more hard to take’.”The album’s release and initial impact presaged another year of intense touring, including appearances at UK metal mecca Donington, and Irish alternative festival Sunstroke. While it all represented a moment for the band’s music, it placed huge pressure on the people behind it. Listen, Jerusalem is a city in the Middle East. The Jerusalem you’re talking about, this majestic utopia – it’s another one of your myths,” he says. The second studio album from Trent Reznor’s industrial noise project featured March Of The Pigs, Closer and the original version of Hurt, later covered by Johnny Cash. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

Inspired by the effusive reaction to Screamager and their new-found status as Britain’s unlikeliest pop stars, Therapy? threw themselves whole-heartedly into the process of writing an album’s worth of material that took their first bona fide hit as a rough template. Although the gnarly riffs and extraneous noise of their early records remained a fundamental part of their sound, the band’s new songs were much more direct and melodic, leading to an album that brimmed with huge hooks and moments of unashamed crowd-pleasing simplicity. Fyfe [Ewing, the band’s drummer at the time] left because we became totally uncool. Not just Fyfe – certain members of the entourage found that incredibly difficult to deal with. If you go to a private school you wear a blazer and a hat, like Harry Potter. I live in Cambridge. People play f**king Quidditch in Cambridge. It doesn’t exist. There’s this ridiculousness.” Knives" – 1994, with "Knives" (kiddie version), "Pantopon Rose" and "Nowhere". This single was a US only promo release.Therapy? ended their brilliant, breathless year on a high. Troublegum cleaned up in music magazines’ end-of-year polls – Hammer voted it the second-best album of ’94, beaten only by Soundgarden’s Superunknown. Their label, A&M, wanted more where that came from, squeezing as much juice from the lemon before the arrival of Oasis and Britpop. In 1993, Northern Irish three-piece Therapy? were touring their major-label debut album Nurse to ferocious crowds in the USA and Europe, but they couldn’t have predicted the success that was yet to come. Troublegum, their 1994 follow-up, would sell more than a million copies and produce the hit singles Screamager, Nowhere, Turn, and Die Laughing, songs which still elate fans to this day.

Sinclair, Tom (11 February 1994). "Troublegum". Entertainment Weekly. Meredith Corporation . Retrieved 10 November 2018. The second album from the Britpop stalwarts was the last to feature guitarist Bernard Butler and featured We Are The Pigs and The Wild Ones. We had plenty of political songs. Potato Junkie was political [it references the Battle of the Boyne in the line, “How can I remember 1690?/I was born in 1965?”]. Church of Noise was political [being about a Romeo and Juliet romance across the sectarian boundaries]. But we couldn’t be as binary as bands can be today.” Cairns now lives in a village outside Cambridge with his English wife. It’s bucolic and a welcome contrast to the hectic pace of life on the road. It also feels universes removed from Larne in the 1980s and 1990s, when bands were sometimes reluctant to confront, in their music, the messy reality of sectarianism in the North. UK Top 40 Chart Archive, British Singles & Album Charts". everyHit.com . Retrieved 24 December 2008.The middle of the album changes things up a little in places. “Die Laughing” has a different groove and different mood, rolling smoothly through the song rather than belting you bluntly over the head. “Unbeliever” is similar in a different way, where there is not so much aggression in the song. This is more the sad reflection on what is happening in life rather than being angry about that same life, almost like the slide on the other side of drunkenness as against the rise of the anger as the drunkenness is taking effect. Do I know this from experience? Perhaps. “Trigger Inside” perhaps has more of that anger involved, but is followed by “Lunacy Booth” that has a similar musical feel to the previous two songs. Writing, recording and post-production was staggered along a number of sessions in 1993, with the Face the Strange EP’ and non-album single ‘Opal Mantra’ boosting the band’s profile in the meantime, and affirming their decision to lean into melody.