8 is the eighth studio album by American rock band Incubus.[1] It was released on April 21, 2017, through Island Records.[2] The album takes its name from being the band's eighth LP. The release of 8 in 2017 saw the longest time between full-length albums for Incubus. The album was previously produced by Dave Sardy, and later re-produced and mixed by Skrillex, a close friend of the band.[3] The album's first single, "Nimble Bastard", peaked at number 4 on the BillboardMainstream Rock Songs chart in April 2017.[4] 8 is the last studio album with bassist Ben Kenney before his departure in 2024.
Background
The writing for 8 began at the end of 2015, when the band was putting together Side B of their Trust Fall EP. However, with the amount of quality content they were producing, they decided to release an LP instead.[5] Recording took place throughout 2016 and 2017, with production and remixing occurring throughout the cycle, including a few weeks before the final release. This was due to Skrillex's late involvement with the project.
Musical style
In 2017, singer Brandon Boyd described the album's sound as "dark and lovely", and recalled that "[Ben and Mike] just got interested in big dirty, grimy riffs again, which is really exciting for me as someone who loves to write rock songs among other kinds of songs."[6]
8 received mixed reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an average score of 45 based on 7 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[7] Many listeners praised the band's return to rock with tracks like "Throw Out the Map" and "No Fun", the overall quality of production, as well as Brandon Boyd's vocal range,[8] while others criticized the lack of personality within the album.[9]
Kerrang! gave it a negative review in May 2017, and commented that, "8 isn't terrible, but it is boring, which is much worse."[7]The A.V. Club awarded the album a C rating, stating that, "over the two decades that have elapsed since the band’s major-label debut, S.C.I.E.N.C.E., every new album has inched further away from the seething thud of late-’90s mook rock — an evolution that culminated, in 2011, with If Not Now, When? , closer in mid-tempo sound to late R.E.M. than anything you’d ever hear at Ozzfest." They added that, "8 walks that sonic progression back a little" and that "the band’s greatest strength and liability remains its frontman, ab-flashing surfer loverboy Brandon Boyd."[9]
Gwilym Mumford of The Guardian gave the album two out of five stars on April 21, 2017, and observed that there is "the faint whiff of the Sheeran on a few of the big ballads here." Mumford claimed that, "the band fares better when they channel the adolescent enthusiasm of their past", noting that "'Nimble Bastard' is a tidy chunk of driving alt-rock reminiscent of Kerbdog or Rival Schools. More like that and 8 might have been a little less second-rate."[11]
Spin's Andy Cush wrote in April 2017 that, "8 [mostly] sounds like a latter-day Incubus album — some solid songs, a little heavier than their exceedingly polite 2011 effort If Not Now, When?, a lot more refined than the swampy genre-hopping weirdness offered on their early releases." He added that, "one exception is 'When I Became a Man', a brief late-album cut that almost could have been ripped from Incubus’s fully zonked-out funk-metal debut Fungus Amongus."[14]
Legacy
When ranking their studio albums in 2020, Kerrang! placed 8 sixth, commenting that "while this is a vast improvement upon the dismal If Not Now, When?, that doesn’t make it a return to form in any profound sense."[15] In a 2022 Louder Sound article, Boyd also placed it sixth in his ranking of the band's studio albums, reflecting that "it was a very different writing process for us, and it has some moments on it, but we’ll listen to this sometimes in rehearsal and there are songs on it where we’re looking at each other as if we didn’t write it."[16]Alternative Press placed it last in their ranking in 2023.[17]
Commercial performance
8 debuted at number four on the Billboard 200, moving 52,000 album-equivalent units; it sold 49,000 copies in its first week, with the remainder of its unit total reflecting the album's streaming activity and track sales.[18] In the second week, the album dropped at No.127, but re-surfaced within the top 100 at No.53 in the third week.
