Songs From the Big Chair

The second album by the UK duo of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith scored some of the new-wave era’s biggest hits via the 1985 chart-toppers “Shout”, “Everybody Rules the World”, and “Head Over Heels”. Ostensibly a synth-pop outfit, Tears For Fears thrived on an ambitious sense of scale that made similarly electronically rooted bands sound almost amateurish by comparison. The band’s intellectual passion (“Shout” is rooted in his obsessions with the work of one-time John Lennon psychotherapist Arthur Janov) and surprisingly mature musical sophistication never cross over into the overblown realm of prog-rock excess, while the album’s forceful solo guitar work is among the era’s most lyrical and refined.