Fever

Fever steps back from the speed of Scream Aim Fire and puts singing at the centre. Don Gilmore, whose work includes Linkin Park and Pearl Jam, produced it; Sony Music's own profile dates the start of recording to early 2009. While they were making it, Matt Tuck described what they were after as more mature and more classic-sounding, and the eleven finished songs contain no ballad at all. The opening run — "Your Betrayal" into "Fever" and "The Last Fight" — keeps the weight in the riffs while the choruses open all the way up. "Alone" and "Bittersweet Memories" both approach six minutes, and that preference for letting a song stretch rather than hurry runs through the record. Japan had it first: Sony Music released it on 21 April 2010 as SICP 2612, with Europe on 23 April and North America on 27 April. It entered the Billboard 200 at number three, the band's highest placing at that point. The Japanese edition carries four extra songs, and the limited first pressing added a DVD — enough that it has always been picked up as a different object from the international eleven.