The record is highly regarded among the members of U2. Mullen said: "I thought it was a great record. I was very proud of it. Its success was by no means preordained. It was a real break from what we had done before and we didn't know if our fans would like it or not." Bono called the album a "pivot point" in the band's career, saying, "Making "Achtung Baby" is the reason we're still here now." Clayton concurred, saying: "If we hadn't done something we were excited about, that made us apprehensive and challenged everything we stood for, then there would really have been no reason to carry on... If it hadn't been a great record by our standards, the existence of the band would have been threatened." The group's reinvention occurred at the peak of the alternative rock movement, when the genre was achieving widespread mainstream popularity. Bill Flanagan pointed out that many of U2's 1980s contemporaries struggled commercially with albums released after the turn of the decade. He argued that U2, however, were able to take advantage of the alternative rock movement and ensure a successful future by "setthemselves up as the first of the new groups rather than the last of the old". Toby Creswell echoed these sentiments in his 2006 music reference book "1001 Songs", writing that the album helped U2 avoid "becoming parodies of themselves and being swept aside by the grunge and techno revolutions". AllMusic called the album "a pivotal moment for dance-rock, happening late in the game but showing that even the biggest young band in the world had an eye on the dancefloor". In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the band's musical transformation "thorough", "effective", and "endlessly inventive". He concluded that few artists at that stage in their career could have "recorded an album as adventurous or fulfilled their ambitions quite as successfully as U2 [did". A 2010 retrospective by "Spin" said that "U2 became the emblematic band of the alternative-rock era with "Achtung Baby"."