The album Faith No More thought was misunderstood: “Our commercial failure”

Posted On December 17, 2025December 17, 2025

While slogging it for years across the 1980s, Faith No More’s funk-metal Frankenstein of a band finally found fame’s lightning bolt once the colossally silly but brilliant ‘Epic’ landed on the rock charts at the decade’s end.

It was an apt title. Thunderous slap bass and scorching metal guitar scored the swaggering slice of Wagnerian pop, all fronted by Mike Patton’s hyper-animated cartoon rap delivery, having not long joined the band after the departure of former vocalist Chuck Mosely. Nothing sounded like them, nor had such a colourful gaggle of characters and oddballs invaded MTV with such comic fervour, ‘Epic’ enjoying heavy video rotation with its eyeball hands and Patton’s boxing-gloved camera mugging.

Yet, any new fans enamoured with 1989’s The Real Thing weren’t going to be offered a sequel. The influences and stylistic fancies within Faith No More were too eclectic to stay put in the metal world exclusively, a creative taste for unorthodoxy no less palpable from Patton, who had already kick-started his confounding Mr Bungle venture as early as 1985.

Eager to look beyond mere groove rock, Faith No More chartered a course toward soundtrack instrumentals, country, soul, and death metal pastiche for a follow-up LP that kicked any remote expectations into distant touch.

Dropped June 1992 to feverish anticipation, Angel Dust would suffer a strange narrative around its reception, unfamiliar to fans and Faith No More themselves. Supposedly, it bombed, too idiosyncratic and eccentric for the metalheads to ever love as deeply as The Real Thing. It was a different album. While led by the more ‘classic’ sounding ‘Midlife Crisis’ single, Angel Dust’s bizarre mulch of leftfield flavours likely alienated some fans, including the band’s hairy guitarist Jim Martin, dubbing the sound as “gay disco” and jumping ship the following year.

Ask any fan their favourite Faith No More album, however, and you’ll either get The Real Thing, Angel Dust, or an “I just can’t decide between the two!” response. The band’s fourth record stands tall in their canon, offering an explosively inventive LP effort still slamming with metal heft when it needs to, while comfortable in the myriad of genres they’re exploring. Angel Dust was a commercial winner too, their biggest-selling album to date, peaking at number two on the UK charts and debuting at a respectable ten on the Billboard 200.

So why the bad rap? “Up until about ten years ago, Angel Dust was considered our commercial failure,” bassist Billy Gould revealed to Songfacts in 2012, reflecting on the unfair reputation heaped on the album. “At least by the media and record industry, but not with the fans.”

Gould went on to counter similar perceptions that subsequent albums King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime and Album of the Year, too, faced lukewarm reception, outside the US at least. “Everywhere else, those albums were taken for what they were and generally were well received,” he stressed. “As the artists who created these albums, I think that most of us in the band feel these two records were easily on par with all of the other efforts…”

It’s a recollection that may surprise even longtime fans. Later albums were indeed met with mixed critical reception, the general consensus agreeing that the virtuoso artistry was admirable, if beginning to lack compelling ideas supporting such myriad musicality. The same can’t be said for Angel Dust, however, a fantastic record marrying an outlandish genre grab bag with electric hard rock pummel, still bristling with fraught perfection well over 30 years later.

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