Some bands chase the future. Tears for Fears tried that, briefly. It didn’t take.
“We were left with 15 to 18 attempts at trying to make a modern hit single,” Curt Smith says, recounting their misguided foray into “speed dating” with younger co-writers at the advice of their management. “It didn’t have any balance. It didn’t have any ebb and flow. It was all kind of on one level.” Roland Orzabal chimes in, “We basically had to kind of start again.”
Thus began the long road to The Tipping Point, their first album in 17 years—and one that almost never happened.
But even in their false starts, a few things survived. “My Demons,” the monstrous electronic brain-melter that became one of the album’s centerpieces, was salvaged from the ashes. The line “my demons don’t get out that much” sounds like something thrown off with a smirk, but Orzabal insists it was the very first lyric he wrote for it. “It seemed like fun at the time. It seems more relevant nowadays. When they do get out, it gets quite ugly in society.”
Society, of course, had gotten plenty ugly by the time they actually got around to writing the songs that would make the final cut. Orzabal found himself trapped in rural English luxury—“a three-acre estate in the west country with a swimming pool and a tennis court. It was hell,” he deadpans—watching the world burn via CNN and his iPad. “You put on the news and you see the rage… justifiable, understandable, and disturbing.” Out of that surreal contrast came “Rivers of Mercy,” a track he says was designed to “wash away the pain.”
Tears for Fears have always been serious about serious things, but The Tipping Point finds them swapping out youthful finger-pointing for something more grounded—and more terrifying. “We were blaming our parents, we were blaming the establishment,” Orzabal says of their early years. “We’re now 60 years old… we can no longer blame our parents. Sorry.”
Instead, they now reflect society with the exasperated clarity of men who’ve seen the future—and are no longer interested in pretending to fix it. “No one’s really speaking from their heart,” Orzabal says. “Everything’s being shut down. Freedom of speech is being limited. I think it’s the job of the artist to take a step back and go, ‘Okay, this is what’s going on, guys. How do you feel about it?’”
That kind of creative honesty was what finally saved the album. “We got together through desperation,” he admits, remembering an early 2020 writing session at Smith’s house in LA. “Two acoustic guitars and a little iPhone voice memo… and came up with ‘No Small Thing.’ We kind of thought, ‘Oh my god, why haven’t we been doing this for the last seven years?’”
That song, an epic acoustic-to-armageddon folk-pop freakout, became the spiritual blueprint for the rest of the record. “That tells you what the album’s going to be about,” Orzabal says. “It’s a journey in and of itself.” And as Smith puts it, once they stopped chasing trends and trusted each other again, “the process was actually very simple.”
That journey included grief too. Orzabal speaks openly about a period in 2017-18 when loss and illness nearly consumed him. “We don’t talk about it. Death is such a taboo,” he says, his tone sharpening. “We’ve lost any sense of belief about death. We’ve been convinced, through science, that that’s it. So we’re left holding this kind of puzzle… the question of life becomes unanswerable.”
Tears for Fears never did hit their management’s target of a “big modern-sounding record.” They made something better. Something honest. Something haunted. Something full of rage and mercy and ghosts and clarity. “We care deeply about things,” Orzabal says. “We’re just trying to reflect back exactly what is going on.”
Will there be a Chapter Four? Smith isn’t betting on it. “We’ve done that before, and they more often than not don’t come to fruition,” he shrugs. Orzabal, meanwhile, promises that if nothing else, they’ll make this next tour count: “It’s unforgivable if we don’t deliver a crazy, brilliant show.”
And with a record this good, forgiveness might be in short supply.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
