Tears For Fears announce first new album for 17 years

Tears For Fears are to release their first new album for 17 years, with band co-founder Roland Orzabal saying “everything first had to go wrong”.

The Tipping Point, the pop-rock duo’s seventh studio album, is said to reflect many of the personal and professional “tipping points” they and the world have faced over the last 17 years.

The band, consisting of Orzabal and Curt Smith, released the title track as a single on October 7 and the new album will be available from February 25 next year.

Orzabal said: “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.”

Smith said: “If that balance doesn’t work on a Tears For Fears album, the whole thing just doesn’t work.

“To put it in simple terms, a Tears For Fears record and what people perceive to be the sound of Tears For Fears is the stuff we can both agree on.”

The music video for the new single The Tipping Point opens with a vase of roses moving slowly along a table until it crashes to the floor and the room starts spinning.

It then cuts to clips of Orzabal and Smith singing, intersected by images of a woman in a black dress floating through a room and in the sky.

The track is said to have been inspired by a personal tipping point in Orzabal’s own life, and aims to capture the grief of watching someone you love lose a long battle with disease.

The band were formed in Bath, Somerset, in 1981 and achieved international success in the 1980s with hit songs such as Shout and Everybody Wants To Rule The World.

The Tipping Point is their first album since their 2004 release Everybody Loves A Happy Ending.

Since then, they have toured across the UK, and in 2017 produced Rule The World, a best-of compilation.

The pair also won the outstanding song collection prize at the 2021 Ivor Novello Awards last month.

They began making the new album by committee with some of today’s hit songwriters at the request of their previous management; however, this eventually fell through.

Orzabal said: “Eventually, that pressure and tension divided us, not just from our management but from one another too.”

The band then switched to new management, and Orzabal added: “Suddenly, for the first time in a long time, we felt like we had someone in our corner who understood what we were trying to do.

“We felt like we had somebody on our side.

“It was the first time in a long time that we decided we have to do this.”

On the album, the duo are joined by longtime collaborator Charlton Pettus and producers and songwriters Sacha Skarbek and Florian Reutter.

Smith said: “When you’ve known each other as long as we have, and have worked together as long as we have, there’s a bond there that becomes familial.

“So, it’s different from a friendship, and it’s different from a marriage. It’s literally like that’s your brother.

“It’s the kind of bond that you can’t really break. It can fall apart at times.

“You separate for periods, which I also think is healthy, really.

“But in the end we always seem to find each other again.”