Audio Adrenaline - 1990s

1990s

After signing their deal with Forefront, the band started writing and recording demo songs with some similar to "My God" for the first album. However, the edgy demo songs were not what Forefront was looking for. What resulted was a debut album of drum machine driven hip-hop. Their first album under Forefront, the self-titled Audio Adrenaline, was released in 1992. It included "DC-10", the only track from the original A-180 recordings. The album was well received selling 75,000 copies. The follow-up album, Don't Censor Me, came the next year and featured what is considered the biggest hit of the band, and arguably one of the biggest hits in Christian music history – "Big House". The album sold 250,000 copies and launched the band into stardom. The album also includes the song "We're a Band", which remained one of their live staples until their retirement. After that, they released a live album titled Live Bootleg.

In 1996, their third album, Bloom, was released. The album featured the band returning to their original rock roots, as opposed to their experiments with rap music. The album was a huge hit becoming the only album of the band to be certified gold by RIAA in 1999. It also marked guitarist Barry Blair's final album, who decided to become a music producer. Blair still contributed to a song from their next album.

With Blair gone, Audio Adrenaline needed a new guitarist. They found a temporary fill in Brian McSweeney (from Seven Day Jesus), but he decided to stay with his fulltime act. They then turned the guitars over to Tyler Burkum, who joined the band at only 17 years of age, just in time to record some guitars on the band's next album, Some Kind of Zombie. The album, released in 1997, was also the first to feature Ben Cissell as the band's full-time drummer, though Cissell had played percussion on their previous album. In 1999, the band released Underdog, its fifth studio album. The band also opened for dc Talk on the "Jesus Freak World Tour".