Extreme

Extreme is an American rock band from Boston, Massachusetts, formed in the mid-1980s around guitarist Nuno Bettencourt and singer Gary Cherone. The band emerged from the hard rock and hair metal scene but stood out through Bettencourt's virtuosic, funk-inflected guitar playing, which gave their music a distinctive groove alongside heavier riffing.

Their breakthrough came with the 1990 album Pornograffitti, a concept record subtitled A Funked Up Fairy Tale that mixed hard-hitting funk metal tracks like «Get the Funk Out» with the acoustic ballad «More Than Words», which became a massive worldwide hit and remains the band's signature song. The contrast between their heavy, rhythmically complex material and stripped-down acoustic songwriting became a defining trait of the group.

After Pornograffitti, Extreme continued to evolve stylistically on later albums, incorporating more classic rock and post-grunge influences. The band went through lineup changes and periods of inactivity over the decades, with Cherone briefly fronting Van Halen in the late 1990s, but Bettencourt and Cherone have remained the group's core, periodically reuniting to record and tour, including later albums that revisited the funk-metal energy of their early work.