"I was walking down the street and I saw this junkie washing out his needle with wine." How one of the most hyped metal bands of the 90s bounced back from firings, studio disasters and, erm, constipation

One of the most challenging things a band will ever have to navigate is to follow up a legendary debut album. The sky-high expectations, the pressure to recreate the special moment your fans discovered you; it’s taken down some of the most hotly tipped new artists in music over the years.

It’s a position that Machine Head found themselves in when they were tasked with creating the follow-up to 1994’s Burn My Eyes, an album that had seen them heralded as the future of heavy music. The pressure of that alone was enough of a strain but add in the firing of an important band member, vanishing vocal tracks and, erm, constipation, and it’s a wonder that they made anything at all - let alone an album as strong as The More Things Change....

With Burn My Eyes, Machine Head had created a debut album of such quality that it saw them almost immediately pushed to the highest echelons of the metal scene; they were added to the bill as Slayer’s main support in Europe on the thrash legends' 1994 tour, and when they came back to Europe a year later as headliners they found themselves selling out the same venues, including the 5,000-capacity Brixton Academy. They were also hand-picked by Metallica to play the prestigious Donington Monsters of Rock festival that summer.

On the surface, things couldn’t have been going much better, but there were cracks beneath the surface. At Monsters Of Rock, drummer Chris Kontos was absent, replaced by Walter Ryan, who had sat in for the entirety of Machine Head’s summer festival run. At first the band shrugged it off as purely down to sickness.

“He’s at home tending to an illness that sent him home from Japan,” MH bassist Adam Duce told MTV at the time. “We had Walter come out to Australia with us and he came through like a champ.”

But the truth was, Kontos would not be returning, and it seemed to be somewhat acrimonious circumstances that led to his departure. On a lengthy post on a music forum in 2004, Kontos gave his side of the story.

“I was sick with some hardcore viral infection and had to come home for surgery from Japan,” he said. “I got the operation and went on the South American tour and got sick once again. I had to miss Donington. No one was more bummed out about that than me, trust me. Not only did I get no love from my band, I got kicked out!”

Kontos was replaced by Sacred Reich drummer Dave McClain, and Machine Head set about writing that notoriously difficult second album.

“When the first record you put out goes Gold, there is a substantial amount of pressure to follow it up,” Frontman Robb Flynn told Metal Injection in 2025. “To have at least the same amount of success or more. Everyone was talking the ‘sophomore slump’. We heard that a hundred times.”

As Machine Head entered the studio in June 1996 with producer Colin Richardson, they assumed that their new record would be ready to go by October of that year.

“We set a standard with Burn My Eyes, and we don’t want to fall below it... we will not fall below it,” Flynn told MTV during a studio visit by the channel.

But pitfalls were constantly put in their way: McClain injured his leg, which kept him off his drum stool for a protracted period, full tracks of vocals and guitar vanished during the recording process and had to be re-recorded, and the mixing period took six months, resulting in the band making three separate mixes before they were happy.

“The album just sounded shit at first,” Flynn told Kerrang! In 1997. “Second time around it was alright, but it wasn’t sending shivers up our spines. We set a standard with Burn My Eyes’ production, and we aspire to a little bit more. That’s why we did the third mix. How does it sound? Colossal!”

He may have been saying all the right things, but the toll this took on the band was real. When Metal Hammer went to hear the album, named The More Things Change... in April 1997, Flynn admitted that he "was so stressed I didn’t shit for six days.”

We can’t tell you exactly when Robb finally did have that poo, but The More Things Change... was finally scheduled for release on March 24 1997. It had suffered a six-month delay, with Flynn trying to shrug off his annoyance in interviews.

“We just wanted to go further into debt,” he joked to Kerrang! prior to the album's release. “I don’t want to see any money for the next ten years. Seriously, it was frustrating and tiring. You see, everything sounds great in the studio. The test is how something sounds on my shitty little stereo at home.”

It had taken some time, but the album was worth the wait. Lyrically, Flynn stayed in the same lane as much of the things that he wrote about on the band’s debut: his distain for those in power and tales of societal decay. One of the album’s lead tracks was inspired by a shocking scene he came across in his hometown.

“I was walking down the street in Berkley, California one day,” he remarked to Kerrang! “And I saw this junkie washing out his needle with wine, which was pretty harsh. So this song is kinda saying ‘You’ve got to wake up and sort out the shit in your life.'”

The song in question was Take My Scars, a propulsive, groove-heavy metal rager which built on Flynn’s chiming opening guitar and showcased both a new level of power and restraint from Machine Head. It sounded like the grown-up cousin of early MH anthems like Old or Davidian, the kind of standout track the band needed to prove they still had it.

“I wanted to lean into the Neurosis influences and lean into the Godflesh influences,” Flynn said to Metal Injection of his inspiration for the music. “Make it really heavy and claustrophobic.”

After The More Things Change...’s lead single Ten Ton Hammer failed to trouble the charts, Take My Scars was released on November 24, 1997, and matched the band’s highest charting position in the UK rock and metal chart when it peaked at number two.

Machine Head - Take My Scars [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube

Watch On

Its success, and the sold-out European tour the band would undertake in December of that year with special guests Entombed and Misery Loves Company, showed that despite all the drama, Machine Head had navigated the dreaded “sophomore slump”.

“At the end of the day ,it ended up working,” Robb smiled to Metal Injection later. “It was a killer moment in time and it did equally as well, thankfully.”

Burn My Eyes may well be considered the classic album, but it's debatable whether Machine Head would still be so many decades into such a fantastic career had they dropped the ball straight after its release. Thankfully, with an album like The More Things Change... and its world class second single in their arsenal, they didn't have to worry.