Making an album is often a costly endeavor. While some bands have produced legendary albums with very low budgets in the past, others have spent millions of dollars on recording a single album. In this article, we take a look at some of the most expensive metal and rock albums by bands that changed studios, producers and even band members in order to find the perfect sound!

1- AC/DC – For Those About To Rock (1981)

After releasing Back in Black, the second best selling album of all time, AC/DC went into the studio in Paris to record their eighth studio album, For Those About To Rock. One of the familiar names in the studio was Mutt Lange, who had also produced “Highway to Hell” and “Back in Black”. As a result of Lange’s perfectionism, they spent the first 3 days in the studio working only on the snare sound. After 10 days, Lange couldn’t find the sound he was looking for and stopped the studio sessions, they spent the next 2 weeks trying many studios and the final decision was a mobile recording studio. However, Lange’s slowness created tension with the band members who entered the studio with all the songs ready. According to Malcolm Young, after 3 months of long and tedious recording process, which the band spent “moving around”, neither the band nor the producer could say whether the result was right or wrong because everyone was fed up with the album. Also, during these 3 months of recording the album, the band turned down 1 million dollars to tour with The Rolling Stones.

The cost of this whole album recording process, including the mobile studio that Mutt Lange brought from London, along with the many studios and engineers that were changed, was about 1 million dollars.

2- Foo Fighters – One by One (2002)

The making of Foo Fighters’ “One By One” album was a challenging time for the band. They spent months trying to make the perfect record until Dave Grohl realized it was going nowhere and decided to stop working. Grohl said in an interview about the making of the album, “We were making an album that wasn’t working at the time. We started in October 2001. After about three and a half months I realized that what we were doing didn’t sound familiar. It didn’t feel right. The most important thing in our band is that the songs are right and the recordings feel good. We were very focused on the production because our intention was to make a big rock record. But the energy tends to diminish after three months. Spontaneity and energy have a lot to do with rock music and so rock records shouldn’t take long to make.”

After a break from recording, Grohl accepted an invitation from Josh Homme of “Queens of the Stone Age” to sit behind the drums on the band’s “Songs For The Deaf” album, a development that even made Grohl’s own bandmates think he would never return. But it wasn’t to be, and the 29 recordings they had made before the hiatus were discarded and Grohl and Taylor Hawkins worked on the new album for 12 days in the basement studio of Grohl’s home in Virginia. The rest of the band members added their parts later in Los Angeles, and “One By One” was finally completed. The album included hits such as “Times Like These”, “All My Life” and “Low”, but overall, Grohl later expressed his dissatisfaction with the final result.

The album is said to have cost over 1 million dollars due to the separate recording sessions of the band members, months of studio time and the discarding of previous recordings.

3- Korn – Untouchables (2002)

Korn teamed up with producer Michael Beinhorn with the goal of making their 5th studio album “Untouchables” “a great rock record that will never be made again”. During the two years of studio work, they spent only 5 months on vocals and 1 month working on the drum sound without recording anything. There were also times when Jonathan Davis came to the studio to record and sang only one note and then went home without recording because he was told that his voice was not good enough that day. In addition, “Untouchables” was the first album to be recorded entirely in 96kHz, which required some new technology and added to the costs. In addition to the high studio costs of around 1 million dollars, the extravagant lifestyle of the Californian musicians and the hiring of a crew of 15 throughout the recording process added another dimension to the cost. According to bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu in an interview, $4 million was spent during the production process. Most of this money was spent on housing the crew and financing the band’s lavish rock-star lifestyle.

Although the album sold an impressive 5 million copies, this was no mean feat for the band, as their previous album “Issues” sold over 13 million copies.

4 – Def Leppard – Hysteria (1987)

In February 1984, Def Leppard gathered to work on their new album, but this time the pressure was much higher because they had already achieved great success with their 1983 album “Pyromania”. Now everyone was expecting them to surpass this success.

First of all, they started writing the songs with producer-songwriter Mutt Lange, with whom they had been working since their 1981 “High’N’Dry” album. However, Lange was unable to produce the album due to his tight schedule. In this case, the band went into the studio with Jim Steinman for the first year of recording. After 8 months they parted ways with Steinman due to disagreements and replaced him with engineer Nigel Green. According to Green, he went into the studio thinking that he would only record vocals and finish the final mix, but it soon became clear that most of the recordings still needed to be recorded. Green did what he could to improve the recordings and sound, but in the end it was Mutt Lange who they really needed.

While the band was struggling for a producer, something they could never have predicted happened. Just after Christmas 1984, the band’s drummer Rick Allen was in a terrible car accident and lost his left arm. Everyone was shocked, but it never occurred to the other members of the band to find a new drummer or to think that they were doomed. According to Green, after this incident, the band went back into the studio for “Hysteria”: “The story I heard was that Mutt Lange went to Rick’s bedside and convinced the 21-year-old Rick that he still had a career playing with the band. Rick’s eyes lit up because the one thing he always wanted to do was play drums. That’s when Mutt wanted to get back into the production and the making of “Hysteria” began again.” 

Rick Allen returned to the band just 6 weeks after the accident and started working on the new drum kit he had planned in his head while he was in the hospital, which would allow him to play the left hand parts with his left foot. From then on, the album took 2 years to make.

As a result, the album suffered all kinds of delays. It took about a year for Rick Allen to learn how to play drums again and get used to his new system. At one point, even though it wasn’t very serious, Joe Elliot, the vocalist of the band, had health problems and there were delays again. In addition to the producer problems from the beginning, Mutt Lange’s perfectionist nature and time-consuming and extensive recording techniques took 3 years. Even though the album cost about 4.5 million dollars, it paid off, selling 25 million copies and becoming an immortal album with almost every track being a hit. Personally, it is one of my favorite albums from the 80s.

5- Metallica – Metallica (The Black Album, 1991)

After selling 2 million copies of “…And Justice For All”, the band began to think that the album’s complex, long, progressive trash concept was an obstacle to their goal of achieving greater success. According to James, they had gone as far as they could in terms of complexity and showmanship. Kirk, on the other hand, saw the audience yawning, looking at their watches, bored when they played …And Justice For All on tour. And when it came to the next album, the band didn’t want to go down the same difficult route.

“We had our sights set on bigger things. There were some mega albums at the time, like Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Def Leppard, who sold 8 million, 9 million copies… That’s what we wanted. It’s obvious. We wanted a “Back in Black”,” he explained in a later interview.

As a result, in the summer of 1990, they started writing new songs with the instruction “Keep it simple”, but when it came to recording, they needed help. Their previous three albums had been produced by Hetfield and Ulrich and Flemming Rasmussen, but the band felt that for the next album they needed someone new to come in and shake things up. They asked their manager to contact Canadian music producer Bob Rock, who at the time had produced albums for bands such as Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe and The Cult, to offer to mix the album. When Bob Rock came back with an offer to produce the album, not mix it, the band’s first reaction was “We are Metallica, no one can produce us, no one can tell us what to do”, but later they accepted the offer. However, the already difficult relationship continued throughout the production process and the band had many disagreements with Bob Rock. Because of their “keep going until it’s perfect” approach, they repeated everything many times and it was a long process, but they got what they wanted. To date, the album has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.

After 9 months of production, orchestral arrangements written by award-winning composer Michael Kamen for the track “Nothing Else Matters”, re-recording, mixing, editing, etc., the album cost 1 million dollars.

6 – The Darkness – One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back (2005)

After recording their debut album “Permission To Land” for 20,000 pounds and selling 5 million copies worldwide, The Darkness were now financially comfortable for their next album. According to the band’s singer and guitarist Justin Hawkins, they now had “the luxury of time and money to do exactly what they wanted”. With this luxury, they entered the studio at the end of the summer of 2004 with Roy Thomas Baker, who had produced the albums of AC/DC, Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and many other bands that influenced them the most. For the first few months Baker had the band record only backing tracks with different configurations of drums, bass and rhythm guitars. All to achieve the dense, subtle and richly textured sound he was after. While we’re on the subject of rhythm guitars, it should be noted that most of the songs have at least 120 different guitar parts. Baker and the band’s guitarist Dan Hawkins worked on the songs using 40-50 different guitars and different amps. For example, they changed the guitar they used for the first half of a verse for the second half of the verse and then went back to the first guitar for the chorus, but this time with a different tuning, different strings, different amps or different microphones.

After a year of hard work, the band recorded 37 songs for the album and Baker managed to reduce the 37 songs to just 10 songs and 35 minutes. The cost of working with Roy Thomas Baker, the studios and going too far in recording, such as 120 layered guitar parts, cost the band 1 million pounds.

7- Guns N’ Roses – Chinese Democracy (2008)

“Chinese Democracy”, Guns N’ Roses’ first original album after 1991’s “Use Your Illusion”, was 99 percent musically and 80 percent vocally complete, according to an interview given by the band’s then manager Doug Goldstein in 2000, and was planned to be released in 2000. However, things did not go as planned during the summer of 2000 and the following 8 summers. Until the album was finally released in November 2008.

 Although the band officially started working on the album in 1997, the recording was significantly delayed due to line-up changes. With each line-up change, Axl wanted to re-record with a new band member, so everything had to be re-recorded. It was also not easy for him to find a producer that matched what he wanted. Recordings were made many times in 15 different studios with multiple producers, including Youth, Sean Beavan and Roy Thomas Baker. At one point, the band’s production company Geffen even offered Axl Rose a $1 million bonus to finish the album in March 1999. Of course, this was not possible and Geffen withdrew all financing in 2004. After some more line-up changes, re-recordings and arguments with Geffen, “Chinese Democracy” was finally released on November 23, 2008. It took 11 years to make. 17 musicians, 16 senior studio personnel, and an incredible total expenditure of around 14 million dollars. Most of the expenditures were on changing musicians, engineers, producers, rental equipment and studios. There were also various expenses that the accountants did not directly account for, such as guitarist Buckethead building a chicken coop in the studio for recording.