Horrorscope

Horrorscope, the fifth album, came out on Megaforce Worldwide and Atlantic on 3 September 1991 as 7 82283-2. Terry Date produced it with the band again, recording and mixing at Carriage House Studios in Stamford, Connecticut, in March and April that year. After Bobby Gustafson left in 1990 the band brought in two guitarists, Merritt Gant and Rob Cannavino, and became a five-piece with this album. Ellsworth has explained that replacing Gustafson with one player would only have invited comparisons with what they had been. It is a heavy, brooding record that brings elements of doom into the band's sound, and it became a defining album and a fan favourite. Ellsworth says adding a touch of groove here is when they became full-grown. The record label, he recalls, was unsure about the new direction, and the band's anger at that went into much of the album. Track eight, "Frankenstein", is a cover of Edgar Winter's instrumental. It is the band's best-selling album of the SoundScan era, which began in 1991, with more than 120,000 copies in the United States by 2010. On 16 April 2016 in Oberhausen, Germany, the band played it in full for its twenty-fifth anniversary, and the show was released in 2018 as Live in Overhausen. The Japanese edition (AMCY-287) came out on 25 September 1991. The running order here is the original's as printed.