Thirty years on from its release, the New Adventures In Hi-Fi anniversary is a good moment to revisit the record Michael Stipe has called his favourite R.E.M. album, and to catch up on where Stipe himself is headed next, now that a debut solo album is finally taking shape.
The album that captured a band at full force
R.E.M. gave people a lot of versions of themselves across a career that produced 17 studio albums before the group called it a day in 2011. The jangly college-rock of their early years, the expansive anthems of the late eighties, the moodier country-inflected sounds of Automatic For The People, the experimental grooves of the late nineties. Plenty of roads to choose from. But for Stipe, speaking in a 2021 interview, the 1996 record New Adventures In Hi-Fi sits above all of it.
‘I never thought of R.E.M. as a “rock band”, I’m going to put that in parentheses,’ Stipe said. ‘I never thought of myself as a rock person. I always felt like I was a punk rocker who was immersing myself into some post-new wave something and through just presenting ourselves as who we were helping to radically spearhead and alter what pop music was going to become from where, certainly from where it was.’
The context matters. The album came directly out of the Monster tour cycle, written and partially recorded on the road. For Stipe, that process produced something that genuinely reflects the band in its most complete form. ‘For [1994 record] Monster, we were having to go on tour and we needed material that wasn’t from Automatic For The People and Out Of Time, we needed big, loud songs and so we wrote a quote-unquote “rock record”,’ he said. ‘But it was very distanced and taking a lot from glam-rock, an ironic distanced version of rock music. New Adventures… might be as close as we came to being a four-piece rock band and I say that with no regret. It was Bill [Berry, drummer] and Mike [Mills, bassist] and Peter [Buck, guitarist] performing at their very best as a three-piece and me doing what I do on top of that, creating a fearful force.’
‘Looking back, it does feel like it’s pulling from all through our career,’ Stipe added. ‘I’m so proud of that record.’
He also revealed a second record he places alongside it. ‘I have two favourite records that we ever put out, one that has joined New Adventures… as my favourite,’ he said. ‘It’s the record Reveal. It’s just my participation. My contribution to those albums is probably my favourite in those two records.’
Why the New Adventures In Hi-Fi anniversary also belongs to Bill Berry
The album carries a particular weight because of what surrounded it. Berry collapsed on stage during a gig in Switzerland on 1 March 1995, suffering from a brain aneurysm. He recovered, but left the band in 1997, making New Adventures In Hi-Fi the last R.E.M. record to feature all four original members.
Mills spoke about the record’s making in an interview with MOJO. ‘It usually takes a good few years for me to decide where an album stands in the pantheon of recorded work we’ve done,’ he said. ‘This one may be third behind Murmur and Automatic for the People.’ He also reflected on the shadow Berry’s collapse had cast over the sessions that followed. ‘We got into the studio feeling very happy and relieved that everyone was okay, especially Bill. It brought us all much closer and made us realize how important we are to each other. Once we’d been through a crisis like that, making a record was a piece of cake.’
That mixture of relief, solidarity and accumulated road-wisdom comes through in the record itself. Being locked in from months of touring, confident from playing the world’s biggest venues, the band used the studio to push further rather than consolidate. The result is an album that sounds like a group with nothing left to prove and everything still to say.
Stipe’s solo album: from ‘no rush’ to a release date
While New Adventures In Hi-Fi remains the benchmark Stipe holds himself to, his own debut solo album is now moving from long-gestating project to actual reality. He has been candid about the pressure. ‘I want it to be great, but I’ve got the pressure of having been in R.E.M. and it’s a high bar, because I want this to be as good as that, and that’s near impossible,’ he said earlier this year. ‘So it’s fucking exciting but also terrifying, and I’m doing the music for the first time too, and I think I’m good at it but not great.’
That admission is a long way from where things stood not so long ago. In 2023, Stipe told the New York Times Magazine he was ‘in no rush’ to put out the record, according to Pitchfork. The tone has since shifted considerably. In April, Stipe debuted a track from the project called ‘The Rest of Ever’ on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. And the timeline is now locked: the first single arrives on New Year’s Eve, with the as-yet-untitled LP due in May 2027.
Thirty years after the band hit peak form together on the Monster tour, the man who called that record a ‘fearful force’ is finally putting his own music into the world on a firm schedule. For anyone measuring the solo album against the R.E.M. canon, the bar he has set himself with the New Adventures In Hi-Fi anniversary in mind is about as high as it gets. New Year’s Eve is when we find out if he’s cleared it.
Find out more about R.E.M. and read the full story of the solo album announcement at MOJO.
