Every INXS Album, Ranked

Andrew Farriss invited high school classmate Michael Hutchence to join his band Doctor Dolphin in Sydney, Australia in the mid-’70s. Over the next few years, Farriss’s brothers Jon and Tim joined the band along with Garry Beers and Kirk Pengilly, as the sextet changed their name to the Farris Brothers, the Vegetables, and finally the name the world would know them by, INXS.

The band were still playing the Sydney pub circuit when they began opening for the city’s biggest band, Midnight Oil. And the Oils’ manager Gary Morris and their producer Nick Launay helped INXS along the way as they became one of Australia’s top musical exports. With 1985’s Listen Like Thieves, INXS began a string of Top 10 singles in America that stretched into the 1990s, including enduring hits like “What You Need,” “Never Tear Us Apart,” and “Disappear.”

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Even as INXS embraced cutting-edge pop production values and became globally famous, they remained deeply proud of their homeland and steeped in early rock and R&B influences. During their ’80s rise to fame, they released covers of hits by trailblazing ’60s Australian bands, “The Loved One” by the Loved Ones and “Good Times” by the Easybeats, as non-album singles. Hutchence became one of MTV’s most iconic sex symbols, but the six-piece band’s musical chemistry remained at the forefront of its increasingly eclectic and ambitious albums.

Michael Hutchence died of an apparent suicide at the age of 37 in 1997, months after he released his tenth album with INXS, Elegantly Wasted. The surviving members of INXS occasionally toured and recorded with other singers from 2000 to 2012, including two new studio albums, but the band will forever be defined by its peak years with Hutchence. 

On May 9, INXS will release a 40th anniversary deluxe edition of Listen Like Thieves with one LP and three CDs including outtakes, demos, live recordings, and a new stereo mix of the original album. Where does Listen Like Thieves rank among the band’s other multi-platinum hits Kick and X?

12. Switch (2005)

Eight years after Michael Hutchence’s death, the five remaining members of INXS participated in Rock Star: INXS, a CBS reality series in which they auditioned new singers to front the band. Drafting a replacement for a beloved band member who died young is a delicate situation, and INXS turning the process into a game show was a little tacky, to say the least. The Canadian singer who won the contest, J.D. Fortune, does a remarkable job of imitating Hutchence’s voice on his only full album with INXS—as soundalike replacement frontmen go, he ranks up there with Judas Priest’s Ripper Owens and Journey’s Arnel Pineda. To his credit, Fortune also got involved in the band’s creative process, co-writing three songs on Switch. Ultimately, though, you can’t escape the uncanny valley quality of his vocal performances, and outside of the Top 40 hit “Pretty Vegas,” the songs just aren’t memorable.

11. INXS (1980)

The band name INXS was partially inspired by XTC. And at times on their self-titled debut they do sound like an Australian answer to XTC, when they’re not aping Madness and the Specials with the ska rhythms on “Doctor” and “Jumping.” Hutchence’s raw charisma is already leaping out of the speakers, and “Learn to Smile” hints at the songwriting chops the band was beginning to develop. But in 1980, INXS were mostly imitating their favorite U.K. bands without bringing much new to the table.

10. Original Sin (2010)

The five original members of INXS recorded new versions of some of the band’s classic songs with an all-star cast of vocalists, including Ben Harper and Nikka Costa, for the band’s twelfth and final studio album, Original Sin. The band works hard to reinvent the material by changing up the arrangements and tempos, while guests like Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas and Train’s Pat Monahan mostly try to sound as much like Hutchence as they can. The most intriguing interpretation is Tricky’s version of “Mediate,” which makes a case that the 1987 song was proto-trip hop all along. “It’s like karaoke gone haywire,” Aidin Vaziri wrote in the SF Gate review of Original Sin.

9. Elegantly Wasted (1997)

INXS made its last album before Michael Hutchence’s death with Bruce Fairbairn, the Canadian producer best known for some of Bon Jovi and Aerosmith’s biggest albums. That doesn’t mean Elegantly Wasted is a hair metal record, but Fairbairn captures INXS’s louche Stonesy side well on songs like “She Is Rising.” After taking nearly four years between albums and signing to a new label, Mercury, INXS were beginning a new chapter, and it’s bittersweet to hear Hutchence still at the top of his game as a vocalist on some of his final recordings.

8. Underneath the Colours (1981)

By 1981, INXS were becoming Australian chart fixtures and were on their way to rivaling Split Enz as antipodean new wave hitmakers. You can hear the band starting to find its familiar synth-heavy sound on Underneath the Colours, and “Barbarian” is the closest INXS ever got to icy post-punk. But they had entered the studio quickly to capitalize on the momentum of their debut and their first Top 20 single, “The Loved One,” and wound up with one of those rushed sophomore albums that the band thought could’ve been better if they had more time to focus on the songwriting.

7. Full Moon, Dirty Hearts (1993)

Decades years before Beyonce brought the phrase “visual album” into the pop culture vernacular, INXS created music videos for all 12 tracks on Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, each one directed by a different Australian filmmaker. INXS were longtime friends and peers of U2, and it wouldn’t quite be fair to say that Full Moon follows the lead of Achtung Baby—if anything, U2’s 1991 reinvention moved them a little closer to the groove-driven territory INXS already occupied. Still, it’s hard not to listen to the distorted phaser effect on Hutchence’s voice on the lead single “The Gift” without thinking of Bono on “The Fly.” “INXS takes bits of what’s hot—grunge, techno, hip-hop—and makes it their own. The loose mix of dirty guitars and warped ambiance, plus winning cameos by Ray Charles and Chrissie Hynde, makes Full Moon, Dirty Hearts the equal of anything INXS has ever released,” Greg Kot wrote in the Chicago Tribune review of the album.

6. The Swing (1984)

When Chic’s sales took a downturn during the disco backlash, guitarist Nile Rodgers focused on producing other artists, and excelled at helping White artists like David Bowie and Duran Duran make funky, danceable crossover hits. Rodgers only produced one INXS song, but “Original Sin,” which featured blue-eyed soul icon Daryl Hall on backing vocals, was a turning point for the band, a template they expanded on for their future triumphs. The remainder of The Swing, produced by Nick Launay, is a little hit-and-miss, but “Love Is (What I Say)” features one of Hutchence’s most passionate vocal performances. In Australia, The Swing is the band’s only album with three Top Five singles, its sales nearly equal to Kick’s.

5. Welcome to Wherever You Are (1992)

Keyboardist and guitarist Andrew Farriss had long been one of INXS’s primary creative forces, co-writing most of the band’s hits with Hutchence. And Farriss stepped into the spotlight a little more on Welcome to Wherever You Are, with four solo writing credits and lead vocals on multiple songs, including the opening track “Questions.” The suave midtempo “Not Enough Time” was the biggest chart hit from the last INXS album to go platinum in America. But it’s Welcome’s fifth single “Beautiful Girl,” a sweet piano-driven song Farriss wrote after the birth of his daughter, that’s become the album’s lasting legacy, standing today as one of INXS’s top streaming tracks.

4. Shabooh Shoobah (1982)

In 1982, INXS signed deals with American and European labels and made a big splash with their first internationally distributed album Shabooh Shoobah and the dynamic lead single “The One Thing,” a marvel of interlocking guitar and synth hooks. The follow-up “Don’t Change” was even better, a big-hearted arena rock anthem that’s the closest INXS ever came to making their own “Born to Run” or “Baba O’Riley.” All of the members of INXS co-wrote songs in different combinations on their early albums, but Shabooh Shoobah marked the point when Michael Hutchence and Andrew Farriss emerged as their most prolific songwriting team.

3. X (1990)

“The Stairs” is one of the most ambitious and prescient songs Hutchence and Farriss ever wrote, lamenting how people increasingly live in densely populated cities while communicating and socializing with their neighbors less and less. The song may have been a little too slow and cerebral to be released as a single at the height of INXS’s fame, but X had plenty of bombastic anthems like “Suicide Blonde” and “Disappear” to keep the band on the charts. “The arrangements are sparser, with layered guitars, precise percussion, and snatches of saxophone and harmonica underscoring fragmented lyrics laden with free association,” wrote Dave Larsen in the Dayton Daily News review of X.

2. Listen Like Thieves (1985)

British producer Chris Thomas began his remarkable career by working with the Beatles on the White Album, and he’s helmed classic albums by the Sex Pistols, the Pretenders, and Pulp. It’s possible that Thomas never made a bigger impact on an act’s career than with INXS, though—Listen Like Thieves was nearly finished when Thomas, worried that the album didn’t have a surefire hit, urged them to write one more song. “What You Need” became the band’s first Top Ten hit in America, and the three INXS albums Thomas produced represent the band’s commercial and creative peak. “Biting Bullets” and “Red Red Sun” showed that INXS could still play fast, tightly wound punk-influenced songs, but Listen Like Thieves completed their transformation into world-conquering crossover stars.

1. Kick (1987)

The biggest albums had become blockbuster affairs by 1987, spinning off hit after hit with lavish big-budget music videos. Kick stands tall alongside other iconic ’87 albums like George Michael’s Faith, Michael Jackson’s Bad, U2’s The Joshua Tree, and Def Leppard’s Hysteria. But none of those other albums opens with a weird curveball like “Guns in the Sky,” two minutes of grunts and chants and guitar noise that was, surprisingly, one of Hutchence’s few solo songwriting credits. Then, of course, Kick goes straight into a remarkable run of hit singles including “New Sensation,” “Devil Inside,” and their only No. 1 in America, “Need You Tonight.” At a moment when bands like the Cure and R.E.M. were cautiously navigating a balance between pleasing longtime college radio supporters and winning over new fans, INXS were an unabashed pop band whose musicianship was never stifled by the studio gloss, writing songs like “Never Tear Us Apart” that felt like ready-made timeless standards.

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