Cut (1992) is a far better welcome to the 90s for Hunters & Collectors than it could have been. It's a conscious step away from the last couple of albums, with a harder sound and more interesting beats. "Holy Grail", probably the best known Hunters song next to "Throw Your Arms Around Me", is about the band's failure to crack the US market; helped by its tried and true chord progression ("More Than a Feeling" transposed to a different key), it's ironically the closest thing they had to a hit over there. Oddly, "True Tears of Joy" is, according to Wikipedia, the band's biggest hit, yet I'd never heard of it until I bought the box set.
Demon Flower (1994) ushers in the band's "ho-hum" period. Their lives show justified their continued existence well enough (see forthcoming reviews of Living in Large Rooms/And Lounges), but Australians, particularly the youth, were looking to You Am I, Silverchair and Powderfinger for their fix of local music. "Betrayer" holds its own amongst the best of the Hunters catalogue and claims some of the best brass work since the early days, but the most of the rest of Demon Flower is fair to middling at best.
Juggernaut (1998) is no improvement over its predecessor. Mark Seymour had by now smoothed out the gravel in his vocals to the point where he was hardly recognisable as the same that graced any of Hunters' early albums, so when the band steers away from the middle of the road to rock, it's not as effective as it once would have been. When they do make it work, such as in "Mother Hubbard" and especially "Wasted in the Sun", which combines the slow-burning intensity of some of the downbeat entries in the band's early catalogue with the pop sheen of Cut, it really works. However, this doesn't happen often enough throughout the album to distinguish it significantly from Cut or Demon Flower, nor make it a worthwhile sendoff for such a locally lauded and globally under-appreciated band.
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