The next album was to be a musical change of direction; as Sullivan later said, "just as this folk-cum-rave-cum-crusty-cum-new-age thing broke and became big in the early 1990s, we went – whoosh – done that – and went and made a very angry hard rock album". "The Love of Hopeless Causes", New Model Army's only release on Epic Records, appeared in 1993 and led with the single "Here Comes the War", which spawned controversy when it came packaged with instructions on how to construct a nuclear device.