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Tears For Fears Introduce New Album (October 2021)

Tears for Fears Return for First Album in 17 Years

by Frank Ockenfels
Oct 7, 2021

Seventeen years after Tears for Fears last released an album of new music, the beloved band behind “Head Over Heels,” “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” will return in 2022 with The Tipping Point.

Ahead of the LP’s arrival on February 25th via Concord Records, Tears for Fears founding members Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith also shared the first single and title track “The Tipping Point,” which — like the album — was inspired by a series of professional and personal “tipping points” in the years following their last album, 2004’s Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.

For Orzabal, that point was influenced by the death of his wife Caroline in 2017. “It came at a time when my (late) wife was very ill. I was watching her become a ghost of her former self. So the song’s narrator is in a hospital ward looking at people about to cross the threshold that we call death,” Orzabal told Rolling Stone.

…Tears for Fears hadn’t intended to take such a long break between albums; “I would say life and geography got in the way,” Smith tells Rolling Stone, adding that while the band still toured frequently, they didn’t want to be “helicopter parents” to their then-young children.

When it finally came time to make a new album a few years ago, as the duo notes, they were encouraged by previous management to work with an army of “today’s hitmakers,” each of whom tried to “recreate a Tears for Fears classic.” The sessions were an epic disaster, the band admits, and another tipping point.

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