January 30, 2002 — Big Head Todd and the Monsters are releasing their first new studio album in four years, Riviera, March 26 on the band's own label, Big Records, with distribution through Warner Bros. BHTM will embark on a national tour, April 2.

Since their previous label Giant Records closed its doors, BHTM's Todd Park Mohr, Brian Nevin and Rob Squires seized the opportunity to be back in the driver's seat creatively, free of company mandates. The band felt the climate was right to put out Riviera on Big Records, which they first founded in 1989 for the release of their debut album Another Mayberry.

"We've always made a lot of effort to ensure that the art side of our career is something we're proud of," says Mohr, "and we are really proud of this new material."

BHTM entered the national scene in 1993 with their Giant Records debut album Sister Sweetly. The now platinum-plus disc generated the top-5 rock tracks "Bittersweet," "Broken Hearted Savior" and "Circle," and became the eighth most played album on rock radio that year.

The self-produced Riviera features eleven original songs including the first single, "Wishing Well." The musical mix on Riviera includes what Mohr, the band's writer, calls a Latin sensuality and spirit. Mohr says "I sort of plotted each song as its own little Latin movie... the album is half Gabriel Marquez romance and half Clash war ballad." Mohr also says, however, that Riviera is purely rock 'n' roll -- "There's not a lot of really band-oriented rock music records out there right now, like the first two Police albums and the early Pretenders stuff. There's an excitement to that, and that's the feeling we got making Riviera."

Together more than a decade since they met at Littleton, Colorado's Columbine High School, the trio feel they've become a well-oiled music-making machine. Riviera is their first album since 1998's performance CD Live Monsters, and their first studio release since the Jerry Harrison-produced Beautiful World, both on Giant.