[PREORDER] Hole - Celebrity Skin [RSD Essential]

After two albums built on noise and nerve, Hole made a pop record. Celebrity Skin arrived in September 1998 with Michael Beinhorn producing and a stated ambition to make a California album, all sun-bleached hooks and Laurel Canyon harmonies wrapped around some of Courtney Love's sharpest writing about fame, damage, and the city that manufactures both. It debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 and became the band's biggest seller by a wide margin.

The lineup here is Love, Eric Erlandson, Melissa Auf der Maur, and Patty Schemel, with Billy Corgan brought in to co-write five of the twelve songs. The title track gave Hole its only No. 1 on the modern rock chart, "Malibu" is as gorgeous a piece of radio pop as anyone made that decade, and "Awful," "Boys on the Radio," and "Northern Star" round out a record obsessed with water, drowning, and glamour that curdles on contact. Auf der Maur's backing vocals are a quiet key to the whole thing, softening Love's edges without dulling them.

The reception matched the ambition. The album went platinum in the States on its way past 1.4 million copies sold, charted across more than a dozen countries, and picked up three Grammy nominations at the 1999 ceremony including Best Rock Album. It stands as the most polished and, for many listeners, the most durable record in the catalog.

This edition, overseen by founding guitarist Eric Erlandson, pairs newly remastered audio with restored packaging and the original album artwork, pressed on exclusive Stolen Water Blue vinyl. The name nods both to the record's visual palette and to the diverted water that built Los Angeles, which is the ghost story humming underneath these songs.