Hysteria

Writing began in Dublin in 1984 with Fostex four-track cassette recorders. Lange told the band late in the day that he could not produce because of burnout, and Jim Steinman took over. Sessions started at Wisseloord Studios in Holland on 11 August 1984 with Neil Dorfsman engineering, but the two sides clashed. Steinman wanted a live-band feel, and Def Leppard wanted a more sonically extravagant album than Pyromania. By October 1984 he was out. Collen later said they had thought they were getting the Ferrari and had got a second-hand Cortina. The band then tried producing with engineer Nigel Green until Rick Allen's accident on 31 December 1984.

Lange came back in the summer of 1985 for vocal sessions in Paris. The album then took about eighteen more months, finished between Dublin and Holland, largely at Windmill Lane in Dublin. Lange's own car accident and a bout of mumps for Elliott in late 1986 added delays. The method was the one used on Pyromania, taken further. Parts were recorded separately, sometimes one note at a time, with guitars first to a LinnDrum click and drums and bass last. Drum sounds were samples programmed on a Fairlight, and the band used a modified Rockman headphone amplifier developed by Tom Scholz of Boston. The last sessions were in late January 1987, for Armageddon It and the last-minute Pour Some Sugar on Me, and Lange spent a further three months mixing at his studio in Hindhead, Surrey.

Reception

Lange's stated goal was a hard rock version of Thriller, with every track a potential single, and the album was fitted to the compact disc: twelve tracks and about 63 minutes. Allen proposed the title, after his crash and the coverage that followed. The album topped the UK chart in its first week. In the United States the lead single Women peaked at 80 on the Hot 100, and the album reached number one on the Billboard 200 on 23 July 1988, topping the chart three times for six weeks in all. In the issue dated 8 October 1988 Def Leppard held number one on both the singles and albums charts. Hysteria was certified 12 times platinum in the United States.

Rolling Stone's Gavin Edwards wrote in 2006 that Lange had coated Animal and Rocket in a sweet multitracked glaze, and called the title track six gorgeous minutes of thwarted desire. In the Guardian that year Caroline Sullivan wrote that it "still rocks - loudly and euphorically." Pitchfork's Ian Cohen, in a 2025 Sunday Review, called the opener Women the way to introduce what was then the most expensive album ever made, and wrote that for nearly a year it "began with the sound of failure." The album is in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. A two-disc deluxe edition followed in 2006 and 30th anniversary editions in August 2017.