Euphoria (Def Leppard album)

Following Slang, the band was initially unsure of which direction to take upon reconvening in April 1998. "We just let ourselves go in any way we wanted," recalled Joe Elliott. With Slang we did: we said we're not gonna do the typical Def Leppard things. But with Euphoria we didn't rule them out… because it had been eight [sic] years since Adrenalize. That's a long time to have abandoned your main style of music. So we embraced it."[6]

Former producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange returned for four days. "It was a bit weird, because he wasn't working the same way," recalled Elliott. "He wasn't hands-on. He was more observant. He'd say, 'Stop,' and make a suggestion… We also wrote another song where we did kind of start from scratch. We said, 'Let's do something really off the wall.' That ended up being the song 'All Night' – all groovy noises and orgasmic songs."[6] Three songs were co-written with Lange, who performed backing vocals (as he had on other albums): "It's Only Love", "All Night" and "Promises".

A song first recorded by Vivian Campbell's side band Clock, "To Be Alive", received a Leppard makeover. For the first time since 1981's High 'n' Dry, an instrumental was included: Phil Collen's "Disintegrate". This instrumental was known before as "Spanish Sky", a ballad that evolved into this track.

1996 Formula One racing champion Damon Hill, a neighbour of Rick Savage, would contribute a guitar solo to the track "Demolition Man".

In its first week of release, Euphoria sold over 98,000 units in the US and just missed the Top 10 of the Billboard 200, reaching No. 11. First single "Promises" topped Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart in June 1999, a spot the band had not held in six years.

Euphoria would later be certified gold in the US, Canada and Japan. The album-supporting tour stretched from May 1999 to September 2000.

The album was released for the first time on vinyl on 21 June 2019, as a part of The Collection: Volume 2 box set.[7] It was then issued on its own in 2022.

Euphoria received fairly positive reviews. Rating the album 4 out of 5, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic notes in his retrospctive assessment that despite the band returning to their signature sound "no longer guarantees a hit at the close of the '90s", Euphoria is "a tight, attractive album with more than its share of big hooks, strong riffs, and memorable melodies." He concludes by saying that "what's best about Euphoria is that it's utterly not self-conscious. Def Leppard feels free to try straight pop, appropriate Gary Glitter riffs, or play straight metal, without caring whether it's hip or commercial. That doesn't mean Euphoria is a classic, but it does mean that it's their most appealing effort in over a decade."[8]

Greg Kot of Rolling Stone, however, was more critical. He notes that "the defining characteristic of Euphoria is its bloodlessness, from the robotic drum tracks to the disconcertingly inhuman tone of those trademark massed vocal choruses", concluding that "the flesh-and-blood Def Leppard apparently never made it out of the Eighties alive."[9]