Tears For Fears co-founders Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith named their band after a phrase from the writings of Arthur Janov, the psychologist who popularized primal scream therapy. The British duo’s songs were also defined by emotional catharsis, drawing on childhood trauma and nightmares to produce big, hooky synth pop anthems that quickly took over the charts in the U.K., and eventually the rest of the world.
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The sound of Smith singing Orzabal’s lyrics has driven some of the most popular Tears For Fears songs, including “Mad World” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” After they became an era-defining MTV staple in the 1980s, however, the two old friends went their separate ways for most of the ’90s, with Orzabal continuing to lead Tears For Fears while Smith made solo albums and started a new band, Mayfield. The duo eventually reunited and began playing arenas again, with 2022’s The Tipping Point becoming the band’s first Top 10 album in the U.S. in over 30 years.
The band’s sophomore album, Songs from the Big Chair, was released on February 24, 1985. It’s by far the biggest Tears For Fears album, but is it also their best?
12. Raoul and the Kings of Spain (1995)
Tears For Fears dropped off the charts with Raoul and the Kings of Spain. By this point, the band was really led creatively by Orzabal, and he was indulging in iffy ideas like a song called “Sketches of Pain” with a vaguely Miles Davis-ish synth trumpet section. Oleta Adams, the American singer who launched her career with a guest appearance on the 1989 Tears For Fears single “Woman in Chains,” reunited with Orzabal for another duet, “Me and My Big Ideas,” that’s the high point of Raoul.
11. Ready Boy & Girls? EP (2014)
As Orzabal and Smith began the long process of making the seventh Tears For Fears album, they decided to warm up by recording some covers. And the songs they chose, collected as a limited edition EP for Record Store Day in 2014, showed that the ’80s icons had been keeping up with new music, and were fans of a few Pitchfork-friendly indie bands. Their renditions of Animal Collective’s “My Girls,” Arcade Fire’s “Ready to Start,” and Hot Chip’s “And I Was a Boy From School” are pretty faithful to the originals, reflected through the lens of the classic Tears For Fears aesthetic.
10. Secret World – Live in Paris (2006)
The Secret World CD and DVD releases were recorded at a 2005 concert at the Paris stadium Parc de Princes, just a couple years after Smith rejoined the band. Tears For Fears live albums are light on surprises or revelatory new interpretations, but “Mad World” is slowed down to a tempo somewhere between their 1982 original and the wildly popular 2001 cover by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules. The two frontmen are in high spirits, and at one point Orzabal begins translating Smith’s stage patter to French for the benefit of the Parisian audience. “I’m stupid,” Smith deadpans, with Orzabal dutifully declaring “Je suis stupide.” The unapologetically Beatlesque “Floating Down the River” is the best of the bonus studio tracks that follow the live set.
9. Live at Massey Hall Toronto, Canada / 1985 (2021)
Though it was only released as a live album a few years ago, Live at Massey Hall is a snapshot of Tears For Fears three months after the release of Songs from the Big Chair, just as “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was racing to the top of the charts in Canada (as well as America and many other countries). They were still getting the hang of bringing their complex studio creations to life on stage in 1985, and have become a better live band in the decades since. Still, it’s exciting to hear Tears For Fears perform at the height of their popularity, and saxophonist Will Gregory’s embellishments on the chorus of “Head Over Heels” are a welcome addition to the song.
8. Saturnine Martial & Lunatic (1996)
Each Tears For Fears album has been the result of years of arduous work, and that means that a lot of interesting material was left on the cutting room floor for a rarities compilation. Saturnine Martial & Lunatic is a surprisingly enjoyable potpourri of experiments and one-offs, including covers of David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” and Robert Wyatt’s “Sea Song.” The 1983 non-album single “The Way You Are” is an intriguing bridge between the Hurting and Songs from the Big Chair eras, and the Fluke remix of the B-side “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” unexpectedly topped the U.K. dance chart in 1991.
7. Everybody Loves a Happy Ending (2004)
The core Tears For Fears duo released its first album together in 15 years after Orzabal and Smith rekindled their friendship in the early 2000s. Smith, who only co-wrote two songs on the band’s ’80s albums, returned from releasing a pair of solo albums to become a much bigger part of the band’s creative process on Everybody Loves a Happy Ending. True to its title, it’s a lighter and more optimistic album than their earlier work, jettisoning gloomy synth soundscapes for playful psychedelic pop like “Who Killed Tangerine?” and “Call Me Mellow.” The album feels like it’s aiming for Sgt. Pepper’s but winds up closer to a halfway decent Electric Light Orchestra album. “Smothered in brass, strings, synthesizer, and processed vocals, its 12 tracks have almost no room to breathe, and tend to meander in all sorts of directions,” Christopher Gray wrote in the Austin Chronicle review of Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.
6. Songs for a Nervous Planet (2024)
Tears For Fears were on a roll after The Tipping Point, and the four new studio tracks that kick off Songs for a Nervous Planet recall the band’s ’80s heyday more directly than just about any of their later albums. The other 18 tracks, recorded at a tour stop in Franklin, Tennessee, constitute the best Tears For Fears live album, in terms of the selection of material as well as the quality of the recording and the performances. “Suffer the Children” is given a particularly inspired reworking, presented as a piano ballad with Carina Round on lead vocals. The band did, however, face some backlash for the album’s AI-generated cover art.
Read our 2024 deep dive interview with Orzabal and Smith about the album here.
5. The Tipping Point (2022)
The band’s management urged Orzabal and Smith to write with younger hitmakers in the initial sessions for the seventh Tears For Fears album. But the duo eventually discarded most of the material that came from those collaborations, and The Tipping Point starts back at square one with the two strumming acoustic guitars on the opening track “No Small Thing.” “It’s just me and Curt, just like the old days, when we were kids,” Orzabal said when I interviewed the band for GQ in 2022. The Tipping Point’s title track meditates on Orzabal’s grief after the death of his wife of 35 years, and the album has an earthy sound that occasionally blossoms into the kind of state-of-the-art electronic pop the band is best known for.
Read our Tipping Point interview with Orzabal here. In 2022 SPIN named the album one of the best of the year.
4. Elemental (1993)
In 1993, Mercury Records released both Smith’s solo debut and the first Tears For Fears with Orzabal as the only permanent member of the band. Though Smith’s more delicate voice is missed, Elemental still very much feels like a Tears For Fears album, with a little more guitar on swaggering tracks like “Cold” and “Dog’s a Best Friend’s Dog.” Orzabal takes some thinly veiled shots at Smith on “Fish Out of Water,” but the album is best remembered for the kinetic and upbeat “Break It Down Again,” the band’s last Top 40 single in America and a No. 1 modern rock radio hit.
3. The Seeds of Love (1989)
Tears For Fears took four years and spent over a million pounds (equivalent to roughly $4 million U.S. dollars in 2025) to record The Seeds of Love, a quirky and expensive follow up to a blockbuster in the tradition of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. It’s a maximalist statement that features dozens of supporting players, including a rhythm section of Phil Collins and Pino Palladino on “Woman in Chains” and Boy George singing backup on two songs. The sunny ’60s vibe of the lead single “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” which contained an unsubtle dig at Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was its only major hit, and the album’s purple prose and orchestral pomp don’t always entirely work. The incorporation of jazz and soul influences on The Seeds of Love results in some beautiful songs, though, and you have to admire the band’s gutsy new direction in the late ’80s, an exceptionally risk-averse time in the music industry.
2. The Hurting (1983)
In the early ’80s, Orzabal and Smith were in a band called Graduate that played mod revival rock in the style of the Jam. Inspired by the synthesizers and sequencers on the latest Gary Numan and Peter Gabriel records, the duo disbanded Graduate and left its nostalgic sound behind to make a more futuristic noise as Tears For Fears. The cold, icy sonic palette of “Pale Shelter” and “Mad World” also owes something to post-punk bands like Joy Division, and Orzabal’s combination of big melodies and dark lyrics about depression and child abuse made the band an unlikely mainstay on the U.K. singles chart. “Tears For Fears may be too concerned with their own petty traumas, but it is a testimony to their refined pop instincts that they manage to produce this much pleasure from the pain,” David Fricke wrote in the Rolling Stone review of The Hurting.
1. Songs from the Big Chair (1985)
The gleaming melodic hooks of the piano riff that opens “Head Over Heels,” the first song written for Songs from the Big Chair, are like a clarion call that announce the band’s intentions to make something bold, bright, and cinematic. Keyboardist Ian Stanley, the unsung hero of the first two Tears For Fears albums, co-wrote the chart-topping singles “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “Shout,” while Orzabal signaled one of the directions he’d later take the band in with the sumptuous jazz ballad “I Believe.” In the short term, Big Chair separated Tears For Fears from the pack of like-minded British synth duos like OMD and Soft Cell, but in the long term, the album has become an enduring classic that seems to attract more admirers with each passing year.
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