On this day in history (March 7, 1983), Tears For Fears released their debut album The Hurting featuring the singles Mad World, Change and Pale Shelter. However, there is so much more to this album than just the singles. Songs like Suffer The Children, Memories Fade and Ideas As Opiates are all single quality songs and combined, they make The Hurting perhaps my favorite album of all time.

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Videos

Pale Shelter

Mad World

Change

Memories Fade (Live)

Charts and Accolades

Peaked at #1 on the UK Albums Chart

The success of The Hurting lies in its lack of friction, in its safety and, for all their claims that coping with relationships has been warped beyond their ken, Tears for Fears have contrived an assured masterpiece of seduction – Melody Maker

Tears for Fears stand out among the current crop of identikit synth-pop groups by virtue of their resourceful, stylish songwriting and fetching rhythmic sway. Granted, the adolescent angst and bleak, pained romanticism of singer-instrumentalists Curt Smith and Roland Orzabel sometimes come off as an adequate imitation of Joy Division, at best. But for every lapse into sackcloth-and-ashes anguish on The Hurting, the duo’s debut album, there is a heady, danceable pop tune like “Change”… Tears for Fears may be too concerned with their own petty traumas, but it is a testimony to their refined pop instincts that they manage to produce this much pleasure from the pain – Rolling Stone

The success of the album is due to its makers’ ability to package an unpleasant subject – the psychologically wretched family histories of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith – in an attractive and sellable musical format. The work is sometimes uncomfortably personal, but musically compelling enough to bring it back across the decades – AllMusic

Track Listing