It’s been seventeen years since the release of their last album, and Tears For Fears have revealed that the reason for the lengthy wait came down to a lack of communication between band members.
In an interview with Music Week, Tears For Fears guitarist and vocalist Roland Orzabal said that another LP “was always in the balance”.
“We’d forged an album, back in 2016, and Universal – who had our catalogue – said, ‘We love this, we’d like to take two tracks and put out a greatest hits album’.
“The Greatest Hits came out, ‘Rule The World’, and it did very well.
However, Orzabal said that the album plans coincided with a dark period of his life, which caused his relationship with fellow band member Curt Smith to deteriorate.
“We were left with a depleted album – once we’d taken those tracks off, we realised it wasn’t good enough.
“This coincided with a dark period of my life. I was having a lot of personal problems with my late wife who was becoming more and more ill with mental illness and alcoholism [Caroline Orzabal passed away in 2017]. So we dropped the ball for a little while.
Love Pop?
Get the latest Pop news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
“We went back to touring, and Curt and my relationship got stressed beyond anything natural. We stopped communicating.”
However, the pair’s album plans are well and truly back on track, with Tears For Fears announcing their new album called The Tipping Point, that is set to arrive next month.
On penning a new album, Orzabal says, “Before everything went so right with this album, everything first had to go wrong, it took years, but something happens when we put our heads together. We’ve got this balance, this push-me-pull-you thing – and it works really well.”
The Tipping Point is slated for release on February 25th, 2022, via Concord Records. It sees Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith reunite with longtime collaborator, producer Charlton Pettus. Alongside producers and songwriters Sacha Skarbek and Florian Reutter.
For more on this topic, follow the Pop Observer.
Watch ‘The Tipping Point’ by Tears For Fears:
