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The Hurting is the debut album by the English pop rock band Tears for Fears, released on 7 March 1983 by Mercury Records, and distributed by Phonogram Inc. The album peaked at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart in its second week of release and was certified Gold by the BPI within three weeks of release. The album also entered the Top 40 in several other countries, including Canada, Germany, and Australia. It was certified Platinum in the UK in January 1985.
The Hurting is a loose concept album focusing on themes of child abuse, psychological trauma, and depression. Despite its dark subject matter, the album was a huge commercial success. It contains Tears for Fears' first three hit singles – "Mad World", "Change", and "Pale Shelter" – all of which reached the top five in the UK and the Top 40 internationally. It also contains a new version of the band's first single, "Suffer the Children", which had originally been released in 1981, while the album version of "Pale Shelter" is also a new recording. The album initially received mixed reviews but attracted retrospective critical acclaim.
The album was remastered and reissued in 1999, and included four remixes as bonus tracks and an extensive booklet with liner notes about the album's creation. A 30th anniversary reissue was released on 21 October 2013, in both double-CD and deluxe four-disc boxed set editions. For the album's 40th anniversary, new Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound Blu-ray remixes by Steven Wilson, as well as a remastered vinyl edition of the original mix, were released in June 2023.
The songs were written by Orzabal inspired by his own childhood traumas and the Primal therapy theories of Janov. Most of the songs were heavily inspired by the writings of Janov. "Ideas as Opiates" was named after a chapter in Prisoners of Pain, which also was a direct influence on the song "The Prisoner". Musical influences included Gary Numan, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Joy Division.
Having worked with different producers on their first two singles, they recruited Chris Hughes to produce the album. The core of the band Orzabal and Smith worked in a close and democratic collaboration with producers Hughes and Ross Cullum, only using ideas all four of them agreed on. Prior to the album "Mad World", originally thought of as a single B-side, was released and became a hit single. The band's first two singles "Suffer the Children" and "Pale Shelter" were re-recorded for the album.
Melody Makers Steve Sutherland felt that "Tears for Fears's pop primal therapy tends to luxuriate in the attention it attracts, sounds ironically happy to wallow inspirationally instead of seeking exorcism". However, he observed that "the Tears for Fears formula – to translate childhood traumas into adult romance with Sigmund Freud fanaticism – is ludicrously laboured but, crucially, their lyrical lethargy is salvaged by what really sells them; their structural invention... sensibly, their suffering's usually controlled to sound smooth", and that this was the strength of the record: "The success of The Hurting lies in its lack of friction, in its safety and, for all their claims that coping with relationships has been warped beyond their ken, Tears for Fears have contrived an assured masterpiece of seduction".
In a negative review for NME, Gavin Martin stated that "this record and others like it are a terrible, useless sort of art that makes self pity and futility a commercial proposition", and that "TFF and their listeners sound like they've given up completely, retreating from the practical world into a fantasy." He described the album's music as "just the sort of doom laden dross you'd expect from the lyrics: rehashed and reheated hollow doom with a bit of Ultravox here, diluted Joy Division poured everywhere, and the title track sounding suspiciously like one of the old pompous outfits with a welter of – Barclay James Harvest per chance?"
In the US, David Fricke of Rolling Stone said that "Tears for Fears stand out among the current crop of identikit synth-pop groups by virtue of their resourceful, stylish songwriting and fetching rhythmic sway. Granted, the adolescent angst and bleak, pained romanticism... sometimes come off as an adequate imitation of Joy Division, at best. But for every lapse into sackcloth-and-ashes anguish on The Hurting... there is a heady, danceable pop tune like 'Change'... 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."
For the 30th anniversary edition in 2013, Danny Eccleston of Mojo pondered, "Has there ever been a more thoroughly miserable mainstream pop album than The Hurting?... Even when it is uptempo it is sombre, and at its most musically adventurous, in the cavernous minimalism of 'Ideas as Opiates' and gnarly dissonances of 'The Prisoner', it's almost unbearably bereft... But in essence, it was pop." Tom Byford summarised the album in Record Collector as "a surfeit of complex ideas reflecting troubled upbringings married with immediate, infectious, hummable tunes." In Uncut, Wyndham Wallace said it was "a remarkable debut album for a band still in their early twenties", finding them grappling with "their unhappy childhoods in the context of sophisticated synth pop while the genre was still in its infancy."
John Bergstrom of PopMatters felt that "at times, the unflinching approach works to the album's detriment, as Orzabal's songwriting skirts cliché and the obtuse, teenage poetry that some critics seized on at the time of The Hurtings release... But part of the brilliance of Hurting is that such histrionic moments are so seldom. Rather, time after time... the words connect at gut level and in sincere fashion." Calling the record "simply one of the strongest, most fully-realized albums of the early-to-mid-1980s", Bergstrom noted its influence on later acts such as Trent Reznor, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Arcade Fire, and concluded, "The albums that prove to be special, influential, and groundbreaking in their own time, and then in subsequent eras as well, are far and few between. Thirty years on, there is little doubt where The Hurting stands."
At least three of the songs from The Hurting were sampled by some of the most mainstream hip-hop and R&B artists. "Memories Fade" was reworked by Kanye West on his fourth studio album 808s & Heartbreak (2008) into "Coldest Winter". "Ideas as Opiates" was sampled by Drake on the song "Lust for Life", from his third mixtape So Far Gone (2009). "Pale Shelter" was sampled by the Weeknd on the song "Secrets" on his third studio album Starboy (2016).
"Mad World" was covered by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules for the soundtrack to the 2001 film Donnie Darko and later released as a single, topping the UK Singles Chart.
Notes
There had been a previous Blu-ray Audio disc in the High Fidelity Pure Audio series released in 2014, but this disc didn't feature any audio aside from a high resolution stereo remaster.
Tears for Fears
Additional personnel
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