Back in Black
Back in Black is the seventh studio album by Australian rock band AC/DC, released on 25 July 1980 by Albert Productions and Atlantic Records. It was the band's first album to feature Brian Johnson as lead singer, following the death of Bon Scott, their previous vocalist.
For this album's title track, see Back in Black (song). For other uses, see Back in Black (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Back to Black by Amy Winehouse.Back in Black
After the commercial breakthrough of their 1979 album Highway to Hell, AC/DC was planning to record a follow-up, but in February 1980, Scott died from alcohol poisoning after a drinking binge. Instead of disbanding, the remaining members of the group decided to continue on and recruited Johnson, who had previously been vocalist for Geordie.
The album was composed by Johnson and brothers Angus and Malcolm Young, and recorded over seven weeks in the Bahamas from April to May 1980 with producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, who had also produced Highway to Hell. Following its completion, the group mixed Back in Black at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. The album's all-black cover was designed as a "sign of mourning" for Scott.
Back in Black was an unprecedented commercial and critical success. It has sold an estimated 50 million copies worldwide,[2][3][4][5] making it one of the best-selling albums in music history. AC/DC supported the album with a yearlong world tour that cemented them among the most popular music acts of the early 1980s. It has since been included on numerous "greatest albums" lists. On 9 December 2019, the album was certified 25× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), making it the fourth best-selling album in the United States and the best-selling album that never reached the top spot on the American charts.[6]
Release and promotion[edit]
Back in Black was first released in the United States on 25 July 1980. Its release in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe followed on 31 July, and it was released in Australia on 11 August.[28] The album was an immediate commercial success, debuting at number one on the British albums chart and reaching number four on the American chart, which Rolling Stone called "an exceptional showing for a heavy-metal album".[29] It topped the British chart for two weeks, and remained in the top 10 of the American chart for more than five months. In Australia, the album reached number two on the ARIA Charts.[28]
After Back in Black was released, AC/DC's previous records Highway to Hell, If You Want Blood You've Got It, and Let There Be Rock all re-entered the British charts, which made them the first band since The Beatles to have four albums in the British Top 100 simultaneously.[30] Back in Black's American success prompted Atlantic, the band's US record company, to release their 1976 album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap for the first time in the US, and in May 1981 Dirty Deeds reached number three on the US chart, surpassing Back in Black's peak position.[28]
To promote the album, music videos were filmed for "You Shook Me All Night Long", "Hells Bells", the title track, "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution", "Let Me Put My Love into You", and "What Do You Do for Money Honey", though only the first four of those songs were released as singles.[28] "You Shook Me All Night Long" became AC/DC's first Top 40 hit in the US, peaking at number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100.[30]
On 13 December 2007, the album was certified 22× multi-platinum by the RIAA, denoting 22 million American sales.[31] This placed it sixth on the list of the best-selling albums in the US.[32] Worldwide, it has sold 50 million copies, leading Mark Beaumont of NME to call it "the biggest selling hard rock album ever made";[33] rock historian Brock Helander had previously called it "ostensibly the best-selling [...] heavy-metal album in history".[34]
Legacy and influence[edit]
Back in Black is an influential hard rock and heavy metal album.[57] According to Tim Jonze of The Guardian, it has been hailed by some as "a high watermark" for heavy metal music.[58] NME regarded it as an important release in 1980s metal and heavy rock, naming it one of the 20 best metal albums of its decade,[59] while The Daily Telegraph ranked it as one of the 20 greatest heavy metal albums of all time.[60] Paul Brannigan of Metal Hammer cited it as one of the ten albums that helped reestablish the genre's global popularity in 1980, which he called "the greatest year for heavy metal".[61]
According to rock journalist Joe S. Harrington, Back in Black was released at a time when heavy metal stood at a turning point between a decline and a revival, as most bands in the genre were playing slower tempos and longer guitar solos, while AC/DC and Van Halen adopted punk rock's "high-energy implications" and "constricted their songs into more pop-oriented blasts". Harrington credited producer Lange for drawing AC/DC further away from the blues-oriented rock of their previous albums, and toward a more dynamic attack that concentrated and harmonized each element of the band: "the guitars were compacted into a singular statement of rhythmic efficiency, the rhythm section provided the thunderhorse overdrive, and vocalist Johnson belowed and brayed like the most unhinged practitioner of bluesy top-man dynamics since vintage Robert Plant." The resulting music, along with contemporaneous records by Motörhead and Ozzy Osbourne, helped revitalize and reintroduce metal to a younger generation of listeners, "eventually resulting in the punk-metal crossover personified by Metallica and others."[62] In 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die (2008), Tom Moon said Back in Black's "lean mean arena rock" and the production's "delicate balance of power and finesse [...] defined the commercial side of heavy music for years after its release."[63]
Lange's production for the album has had an enduring impact in the music industry. Harrington wrote that "to this day, producers still use it as the de facto paint-by-numbers guidebook for how a hard-rock record should sound",[62] and, in the years after its release, studios in Nashville would use it to check the acoustics of a room, while Motörhead would use it to tune their sound system.[64] American death metal group Six Feet Under recorded a cover of the entire album under the title Graveyard Classics 2.[65]
AC/DC
Production