Way Beyond Blue by Catatonia

Way Beyond Blue, Catatonia's 1996 debut album, arrived on Blanco y Negro with Stephen Street producing, and it plays almost like a catch-up course for anyone who'd missed the Welsh band's early releases. All but five of its songs had already surfaced on those EPs and singles, reworked here into new versions.

Cerys Matthews and guitarist Mark Roberts, who had started the band together in 1992, drive the thing: his guitars chime and snarl, her voice cracks from honeyed to hoarse in the space of a line, and the words lean hard on metaphor. Paul Jones holds down the bass. The album gave them their first UK top 40 hit, "You've Got a Lot to Answer For", which got to No. 35, and it set the table for International Velvet, the record that made them a key band of Cool Cymru two years later.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.