TEARS FOR FEARS vaulted into the international big leagues with the take-no-prisoners layered-sound approach to their February 1985 sophomore album, Songs From the Big Chair. It was a calculated production leap from the aural cocoon of their more minimalistic, electronic-leaning debut, March 1982’s The Hurting—and it was a move that paid off handsomely with multiplatinum sales and upper-echelon chart domination around the globe.
“Once we had dipped our toe in the water, it set us on a course to have a much bigger, much more robust, and not-so-introspective sound,” TFF guitarist/vocalist Roland Orzabal told me, and they immediately knew they had to up their respective game.
