Few songs in the mid-80s attained bigger status than Tears for Fears’ contagious “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “Shout.” As commercial breakthroughs, the singles drew attention to the meticulous detail and sophisticated arrangements gracing Songs From the Big Chair, a creative maelstrom of emotional catharsis, dreamy melodicism, and magnetic lyricism. Having hit the top of the album charts in most major countries, the 1985 album remains a staple of the decade’s essential sounds and a critically beloved work. Mastered on Mobile Fidelity’s world-renowned mastering system and pressed at RTI, this Silver Label LP brings to a warmth and transparency to the music that previous analog editions have lacked. By clearing a direct path to the production, it reveals the myriad soulful complexities contained within tracks such as “Mothers Talk” and “Head Over Heels,” also charting hits. Dramatic, literate, immediate, refined, and subtly elaborate, the material glistens with carefully placed instrumentation. Here, the depth of the piano chords, extension of the brassy horns, high frequencies of the backing vocals, and bite of the guitar solos come to life as never before. Named after psychotherapist Arthur Janov’s primal scream theories—which suggest that adult problems often relate back to parental abandonment during childhood, and that confronting such issues is essential to one’s development—Tears for Fears, and key members Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith transcended their broken-home backgrounds by turning their raw feelings into self-expressive songs etched with equal parts tenderness and directness, earnestness and melancholy. After a promising synthpop-based debut, the duo took its finely crafted art up several notches on Songs From the Big Chair, one of the period’s most introspective and incisive pop works. Rather than consume themselves with weighty prose, Orzabal and Smith cut to the heart of their emotions, framing brooding sentiments and solitary thoughts within tumbling hooks, memorable refrains, and delicate passages. Saxophones, pianos, and support vocals shade the duo’s keyboard- and guitar-anchored compositions, many of which flirt with R&B motifs and austere classicism. Serious albeit freeing, Tears for Fears’ ambitious pop stood apart from the decade’s casually tossed-off fare—a beneficial aspect that’s only grown in stature since the album’s release.