It's been 17 years since Tears For Fears released Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, the first album Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal had made together since 1989's Seeds of Love. (Orzabal put out two Tears for Fears albums on his own in the mid-'90s.) After label and management woes, writer's block and life getting in the way, Smith and Orzabal are back with The Tipping Point, an album loaded with Tears for Fears' signature brand of widescreen pop.
"We spent a lot of time doing all these writing sessions over a bunch of years with a lot of what are considered more modern songwriters, and it didn't really work out for us because we felt it was slightly dishonest," Curt Smith told Apple Music's Zane Lowe. "We were left with a lot of things that seemed like attempts at making a modern hit single, and I don't think that's what we do. We're really an album band. And every single of ours that's done well has come from an album. We've made that album first. So with The Hurting, we made The Hurting before 'Mad World' was released. We made Songs from the Big Chair before 'Everybody' was released and before 'Shout' was released. So eventually, we sat down, just the two of us, with two of acoustic guitars and tried to forge a path forward. And A, it felt more honest. And B, the material at the end of it was far better probably because it was more honest."