Phil Collen's Thoughts on Slang:
LAUNCH: 1996's Slang was very different, though--it was much rawer and more stripped-down, almost lo-fi by your usual standards.
PHIL: Yeah, it was good to get that out. I think it's a great album, very inventive. The style was different: We wrote the songs and recorded them, and that was the end of it. On the album after that [Euphoria], we figured that everyone wanted to hear the classic Def Leppard. Now listening back to [Euphoria], I think, as good as it was, that we made a few mistakes. So this time, we pretty much made a hybrid collage, or whatever you want to call it, of our career. This new album is the perfect thing in between.
LAUNCH: Slang wasn't very well-received, if I recall...
PHIL: Well, music was dark and miserable then. It was trying very hard to be "cool." The artists were trying so hard to be cool and angsty, but there were only a couple of those bands that were really real. Like, Nirvana were great, as real as you can get. So in the '90s, we were so "uncool." We were the anti-Christ at that point. People looked at us and said, "This is everything that we're against!" Then, we thought Slang was a great album, but people said, "Oh no, we wanna hear Def Leppard." And we were like, "We've just done a Def Leppard album [1992's Adrenalize], and you hated it!"
LAUNCH: Do regret making Slang?
PHIL: No! That was really good. If we hadn't have done that, we wouldn't have gotten to this point. Plus, I think there's some great stuff on that. I think it's got some earnest stuff--some basic, really brave songwriting. It was brave because we didn't do the "Def Leppard thing."