Monster (25th Anniversary Edition) [2019 Remaster]

By the time R.E.M. began work on Monster in 1993, everything had changed. “We’d kind of disappeared,” guitarist Peter Buck tells Apple Music. “Except for making these records that sold huge amounts of copies.” Those records were 1991’s Out of Time and 1992’s Automatic for the People, dual breakthroughs that—despite a years-long break from touring—amassed Grammys and platinum certificates. At the end of their first decade, R.E.M. had evolved from indie darlings to elder statesmen for an alt-rock revolution they’d essentially engineered, earning their place as pop stars in the process. Stakes were high. “But one of the things that success affords you is the ability to do something different,” Buck says. “It's best to make left turns when you can.” Knowing that they needed to return to the road—and that they’d be filling arenas—they wanted songs to match the occasion. Where Automatic for the People was clean, spacious, and built almost entirely on warm beds of midtempo acoustic guitar, Monster would be its polar opposite. “We wanted intensity and power,” Buck says. “We didn't want to do a bunch of really slow songs.” Pulling influence from ’70s glam rock, it’s a grimy but often guarded response to their newfound celebrity, draped in electric guitars far thicker than any R.E.M. fan could have expected, even if grunge had made them fashionable. Michael Stipe’s lyrics—written mostly in character, at a distance—are just as inscrutable, and his vocals so buried in longtime producer Scott Litt’s mix that Litt spent the intervening years asking the band for another pass. That remix—included here—massages Buck’s guitars and elevates Stipe’s voice, casting the record in a new, more accessible light. “I think he wanted to make the record like it was us doing Document in ’87,” Buck says of Litt’s remix. “So he took away a lot of what he would consider to be extraneous stuff. I think it’s cool—it makes me rethink what the record was a little bit.” Twenty-five years later, Monste