Red Hot Chili Peppers are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their epic double album Stadium Arcadium with three limited-edition vinyl variants, out now via Warner Records.
The 3x Grammy Award-winning record returns on 4LP colour vinyl. A Canary Yellow and Apple Red pressing is available at all retailers, Brown Smoke and Orange Smoke land in indie record stores only, and a Sea Blue Marble and Ruby Red Marble edition, split across “Jupiter” and “Mars” halves, comes through the band’s own store.
Released in May 2006, Stadium Arcadium followed the By The Way tour, when Anthony Kiedis, John Frusciante, Flea and Chad Smith decamped to The Mansion in the Hollywood Hills, the same house that birthed 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. With longtime producer Rick Rubin capturing it all, the sessions poured out 28 tracks across two halves and just over 122 minutes.
It bowed at Number One on the Billboard 200, their first chart-topping debut, and held the spot into a second week. Lead single ‘Dani California’ spent a staggering fourteen weeks atop the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, and both ‘Dani California’ and ‘Snow (Hey Oh)’ have since passed a billion Spotify streams apiece.
The album won the Grammy for Best Rock Album, with ‘Dani California’ taking Best Rock Song and Best Rock Vocal Performance, and its stature has only grown since, from a five-star Rolling Stone review to Loudwire’s nod as the best hard rock album of 2006.
Two decades on, with the band having sold out stadiums worldwide on 2024’s Unlimited Love Tour and played the Los Angeles handover at the Paris Olympics closing ceremony, Stadium Arcadium still sounds like a career peak. We reckon it is well worth revisiting on wax.
For more on Red Hot Chili Peppers, head to RAMzine.
