10 Best Red Hot Chili Peppers Albums

2006’s epic double album, like almost any double album, suffers somewhat due to its length. Stadium Arcadium is nevertheless still a good double album, justifying its length with a level of consistency not always present in albums of this length. Singles Dani California and Snow show the band in full anthemic chart-topper mode, with memorable choruses, sing-a-long refrains, and iconic riffs.

The band stretch their legs on this album, with hard rock influences in Readymade, locked-in funk on Charlie and Hump de Bump, and beatific melancholy on Hey and Wet Sand. The minimalism of By The Way is fully reversed here, with bombastic, crunching choruses, wailing solos, horn sections and studio trickery employed. This is not the band at their most restrained, but it is the band exploring all of their eclectic influences and expressing themselves fully, and for that, it is always enjoyable, if not always to everyone’s tastes.

Stadium Arcadium has the advantage, more than any other Chili Peppers offering, of having something for whatever mood you may be in, whatever need you may have. It’s all here, and it is the band firing on all cylinders.