Faith No More Released 'A Small Victory' 34 Years Ago

Faith No More released A Small Victory as the second single from Angel Dust on August 3rd 1992.

"Seems to run Madame Butterfly through Metallica and Nile Rodgers." — Trouser Press

During the late '80s and into the '90s, Britain was busy rewriting the rulebook. The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and the rest of the Madchester explosion smashed together baggy grooves, dancefloor rhythms, sampled textures and psychedelic guitars, creating a sound that blurred the line between indie rock and club culture. But while the North of England was discovering the crossover, Faith No More had already been twisting the same DNA into something altogether stranger on the other side of the Atlantic.

Faith No More are rarely mentioned in conversations about dance music, yet the fingerprints are impossible to ignore. Long before Angel Dust, tracks on Introduce Yourself hinted at a fascination with groove over brute force. Chinese Arithmetic and Anne's Song pulse with elastic basslines, synthetic textures and rhythms that wouldn't have sounded out of place spilling from late '80s club speakers. The fact that Anne's Song even received a dance remix only reinforces the point.

Much of that adventurous streak can be traced back to keyboard wizard Roddy Bottum. While most metal bands were looking towards heavier riffs, Bottum was absorbing the futuristic electronics of Kraftwerk alongside mainstream pop, giving Faith No More an entirely different palette to paint with.

Then came Angel Dust.

If ever there was a Faith No More song that shamelessly flirted with the dancefloor without surrendering an ounce of its identity, it's A Small Victory.

The second single from the album glides in on shimmering Eastern-inspired keyboard melodies intertwined with Jim Martin's clean, chiming guitar work. Beneath it all, Bill Gould locks into a hypnotic bass groove that bounces with undeniable dance music swagger, while Mike Bordin delivers one of his trademark performances - swinging, muscular and relentlessly infectious. His drumming never forgets the song's rock roots, even as it pushes everything forward with almost club-like momentum.

Martin's guitar may trade sheer heaviness for melody, but he still drops enough crunch to remind everyone exactly which band they're listening to. Mike Patton, meanwhile, delivers one of his most accessible vocal performances on Angel Dust, shadowing Bottum's melodies before peppering the arrangement with trademark yelps, whoops and beautifully unhinged vocal flourishes.

Then the song takes another left turn.

Faith No More fill the track with an inspired collage of found sounds and samples - fragments lifted from sources as diverse as Right Said Fred, Diamanda Galás and The Wizard of Oz. In lesser hands it could have been chaos. Here, it feels like pop music from another dimension.

It made perfect sense, then, to hand the song over to Martin "Youth" Glover of Killing Joke for a remix. Rather than forcing the track into club territory, Youth simply amplified what was already there, stretching its rhythmic pulse into something that felt equally at home on alternative dancefloors as it did blasting from rock clubs.

Reflecting on the song's unusual sonic palette, Roddy Bottum explained:

"The break in 'A Small Victory' is very typical of using sound sources and being a more rhythmic keyboard player. In that particular song, the sound sources were things as opposed to programs, strings or pianos. Most of that stuff was recorded with a DAT player, just whilst wandering out and about, and then I put them into the keyboard itself."

For all its exotic textures and experimental production, the song's emotional core was surprisingly personal. Patton later revealed that A Small Victory centred on his relationship with his father.

"My Dad's a coach, right? So I guess about the first 16 years of my life all I thought about was winning."

https://youtu.be/i9_hCjcFNO0

The visuals proved just as memorable. Directed by Marcus Nispel, the surreal video looked less like a conventional rock promo and more like a luxury fragrance advert after a particularly vivid fever dream. Patton himself later joked to Rage TV that it resembled a perfume commercial. The striking aesthetic earned the clip a nomination for Best Art Direction at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards, eventually losing out to Madonna's Rain.

Three decades later, A Small Victory still feels impossible to categorise. Too weird for pop, too sophisticated for straightforward metal and too heavy for the dancefloor, it occupies that wonderfully uncomfortable space where Faith No More always did their finest work - gleefully ignoring genre boundaries while making it all sound effortlessly cool.

https://youtu.be/XdxQnhWqrso