Balance is the tenth studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released on January 24, 1995, by Warner Bros. Records. The album is the last of the band's four studio releases to feature Sammy Hagar as the lead singer. It is also the final Van Halen album to feature bassist Michael Anthony in its entirety. Balance reached number 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 in February 1995 and reached triple platinum status on May 12, 2004, by selling more than three million copies in the US.
Featuring a more serious tone than other Van Halen albums, Balance features a full integration of Eddie Van Halen's guitar riffs and keyboard work and contains three instrumentals. The record received mixed reviews from many music critics.
The album was remastered by Donn Landee and released on October 6, 2023, as part of The Collection II; the four studio albums with Hagar, plus an extra disc of eight rarities from this era.
On August 15, 2025, the album was re-released in an expanded edition featuring live performances from Wembley in 1995.
Recording and production
According to Ian Christe's book, Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga, Balance was released amid internal fighting between Hagar and the Van Halen brothers. The band worked eight-hour days for three months recording the album. The first song on the record, "The Seventh Seal", features mystical overtones that came, in part, from Eddie Van Halen's newfound sobriety. His therapist, Sat-Kaur Khalsa, urged him to relax and imagine where he was after drinking a six-pack of beer. After smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and playing guitar for 20 years, he tried writing songs sober and wrote three songs in one half hour period. The album then moves into Hagar's territory with "Can't Stop Lovin' You". The song was taken from his ex-wife's point of view, believing that she was still in love with him. The album reached number one on the Billboard 200, their fourth consecutive number one studio album.
Most of the Balance album was recorded at Eddie's 5150 Studios, located in Studio City, except for five lead vocal tracks that were recorded in Vancouver, where the album's producer Bruce Fairbairn resided. It was mixed by Mike Fraser and mastered at Sterling Sound, New York, by George Marino.
Following the recording of Balance and its subsequent Ambulance Tour (the band renaming the tour as Eddie was having hip issues and brother Alex had to wear a neck brace), Van Halen's second incarnation broke up. Regarding this time period, in 1996 Eddie Van Halen told Guitar World: "There had been a variety of conflicts brewing between manager Ray Danniels, Sammy, and the band since I quit drinking on October 2, 1994... It got so bad that I actually started drinking again."
Songs
thumb|left|Balance opens with the sound of chanting monks from [[Gyuto Order|Gyuto Tantric University (pictured)]]
Balance has a more serious direction than earlier Van Halen albums; as reviewer Johnny Cigarettes described the direction: "Monks are chanting. Sleevenotes are in medieval script. The cover is Athena's mystical arse. Van Halen have decided to get serious on us."
"The Seventh Seal" kicks off the album. Complete with chanting monks and dangling metal bells, the song unveiled a vast, open, U2-like guitar wall that propelled through the darkest terrain the band ever tackled. Eddie revealed in 2012 that "The Seventh Seal" was written before Van Halen became a band. In an August 1995 interview with Total Guitar, Eddie took credit for "[doing] these weird monk sounds at the very top of the record",
"Can't Stop Lovin' You" is a ballad that has been compared to the style of 5150 (1986), with an especially 1980s-style melody; its guitar tone has been compared to Tom Petty but with "strategically" deployed riffs. This is another song based on an idea that predates the album's sessions as there is video of Eddie playing the riff to "Amsterdam" at 5150 Studios in 1987.
Balance also features three instrumentals. described by Guitar World as a "strange piano piece", was reportedly recorded by Eddie in the early 1980s, having rented pianist Marvin Hamlisch's beach house for a summer vacation. The guitarist explained: "I just used to waste this beautiful piano. It was like a Baldwin or a Yamaha. It had cigarette burns all over it and I was sticking everything but the kitchen sink in it: ping-pong balls, D-cell batteries, knives, forks – I even broke a few strings. I don't know what prompted me to do it. I was just fucking around. Actually, it started off with me playing the strings with my fingers. I would create harmonics by hitting the key and muffling the string up and down to bring harmonics out like on a guitar." "Doin' Time" has been described as a drum solo, According to Eddie: "It didn't start out being an instrumental track, it's just nobody kinda liked where we were going with it. So we just left the vocal off – and just like basically any Van Halen song, you take the vocals off and the music still holds up. And here's the proof because this one held up. And we thought, "Oh fuck it, let's put it out like that." It's like what we were doing with the singing, with the vocal, it just didn't add shit to it so we left it right off." Klosterman notes the heavy use of wind chimes in the song, and compares Hagar's singing to Natalie Maines. was then photographed in Wexler's Hollywood studio, with Wexler's daughter being the hand model that pulled his hair. The images were combined with a miniature landscape for the background using Fractal Design Painter (now called Corel Painter). Wexler detailed that the Balance cover had a number of ironies: "the impossibility of the conjoined twins actually playing on the seesaw; the 'calm' twin actually being the aggressive one, pulling the hair of his sibling to create the appearance of an aggressive child; and having no one else to play with in a desolate post-apocalyptic setting, in which unusable playground equipment is the only object in sight." He added that the twins were “designed” to mimic the shape of the “VH” logo. An alternate cover was used for the Japanese release, citing a cultural offense to the original version. On the inside, the compact disc shows the Leonardo da Vinci drawing Vitruvian Man, and the back of the booklet shows an egg balanced upright on a guitar.
Release and promotion
Balance was released January 24, 1995, and is the first release by a platinum-certified act on Warner Bros. since Danny Goldberg stepped in as chairman/CEO. It is also the band's first album since the loss of their longtime manager Ed Leffler, who died of thyroid cancer on October 16, 1993, before Ray Danniels took over management of the band (mostly due to Alex's personal relationship with Danniels as brother-in-law). Warner Bros. VP of merchandising and advertising Jim Wagner said that early 1995 would be the right time to release a new Van Halen album, as "It seems like we've always had success with big acts right after the first of the year". (Van Halen's own 1984 was released in early January 1984.) "Don't Tell Me (What Love Can Do)", the first single from Balance, was released to top 40 and album rock radio on December 28, 1994. Van Halen became the first act to debut at No. 1 in 1995, as their first week sales of 295,000 units earned Balance the number one spot on the Billboard 200. The opening-week tally for Van Halen's Balance was 21% higher than that of For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, the band's previous studio album, which topped the chart with 243,000 units in the summer of 1991.
In the United Kingdom, Balance reached number 8 on the UK Albums Chart, becoming their first British Top 10 placing; Martin C. Strong believes its UK sales were helped by the rare European tour undertaken by the group. In The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, author Colin Larkin commented how Balance reconfirmed how the band's popularity was "seemingly impervious to the ravages of time or fashion."
Two concerts during the Balance tour were filmed and aired as a pay-per-view event at the Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on August 18 and 19. There was talk of releasing a live DVD of the performances, which found the band to be at their peak during the tour. While the release of the DVD never materialized, most of the source material can be viewed on YouTube.
Critical reception
Reviewing Balance for Rolling Stone, Paul Evans commented on the album's "surprises", saying: "While Eddie's new look, a goatee and chopped pompadour, may seem a nod to the plaid-clad ranks, there's nothing alternative about Balance. Nor, despite the Buddhist chanting that kicks off the disc, is there anything otherwise chic."
Reviewing the album for Select, Clark Collis wrote that Van Halen had become humourless since Lee Roth's departure, with Balance doing "little to remedy" this. He added: "Naming a track 'Seventh Seal' after the Ingmar Bergman movie may be an attempt to make an asset out of their dourness. But, 50 minutes of join-the-dots fretwork and dull HM shenanigans later, you decide."
Legacy
Sammy Hagar has since expressed mixed opinions on Balance, reflecting on its difficult production, but noted the presence of several great songs, including the "Sammy grunge-type thing" he pursued on "Don't Tell Me (What Love Can Do)", and deeming it to be "more of a Sammy Hagar record than any of the other Van Halen albums. That is what's odd about that." Popoff himself believed the band were "running on fumes" by the recording of the album, despite the first-rate production of Fairbairn and Eddie and Alex "shining brightly with their respective personal stamps". Eduardo RivadavIa of Loudwire, and the staff of Consequence.
Wilkening commented that songs like "Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do)" and "Take Me Back (Deja Vu)" showed Van Halen "tackling more serious subjects and tones", but added that some songs "come off rather lifeless, as if the chemistry within this lineup had already gone sour."
- The Monks of Gyuto Tantric University – chants ("The Seventh Seal")
Production
- Bruce Fairbairn – production
- Mike Fraser – mixing
- Jeri Heiden – art direction
- George Marino – mastering
- Donn Landee – remastering (2023)
- Erwin Musper – engineer
- Mike Plotnikoff – engineer
- Randee Saint Nicholas – photography
- Glen Wexler – front cover photography
Charts
Weekly charts
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"
! scope="col"| Chart (1995)
! scope="col"| Peak<br />position
|-
|-
|-
|-
|-
! scope="row"| Finnish Albums (The Official Finnish Charts)
| align="center"| 5
|-
!scope="row"| French Albums (SNEP)
| align="center"| 18
|-
|-
!scope="row"|Japanese Albums (Oricon)
| align="center"| 2
|-
|-
|-
|-
|-
|-
|-
|-
|}
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"
! scope="col"| Chart (2025)
! scope="col"| Peak<br />position
|-
! scope="row"| German Rock & Metal Albums (Offizielle Top 100)
| 19
|-
|-
! scope="row"| Japanese Rock Albums (Oricon)
| 17
|}
Year-end charts
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"
! scope="col"| Chart (1995)
! scope="col"| Position
|-
! scope="row"| German Albums (Offizielle Top 100)
| 59
|-
! scope="row"| Swiss Albums (Schweizer Hitparade)
| 32
|-
! scope="row"| US Billboard 200
| 26
|}