TYPE O NEGATIVE released their fifth album, "World Coming Down," on September 21st, 1999, through Roadrunner Records, produced by Peter Steele and keyboardist Josh Silver. It is by common consent the darkest thing the Brooklyn band ever recorded, written after a series of deaths in Steele's family and out of a deliberate wish to abandon the sexually charged romanticism of "Bloody Kisses" and "October Rust." Across seventy-four minutes the songs deal with addiction, grief and physical decay in almost clinical terms — "Everything Dies," "Everyone I Love Is Dead," the twelve-minute "White Slavery" — with the humour that usually cut the gloom almost entirely withdrawn. It became the band's first album to reach the Billboard top forty. Chronicles of Chaos called it the best record of 1999; Steele himself later said he could barely listen to it.