BC didn’t exactly fit into the expected early-1980s new-wave mold—and that was just fine with the band’s co-founding lead vocalist and chief songwriter, Martin Fry. To that end, ABC’s debut album, June 1982’s synth-pop classic , cut a wide compositional swath that deployed a mixture of broadstroke keyboard flourishes, grand orchestral swells, and call-and-response vocal passages. And now, the album sounds even in its recently released Dolby Atmos mix, one that can be found on ’s standalone 40th anniversary High Fidelity Pure Audio in Atmos is akin to “climbing inside a crystal kingdom,” and what he likes best about how the ever-ubiquitous surround maestro Steven Wilson mixed it for Atmos playback. (A longer version of this interview appears in my monthly Spatial Audio File column on the site.)
