Final Straw by Snow Patrol

Final Straw, Snow Patrol's third album and their first for a major label, came out on Polydor in the UK on 4 August 2003 and reached America in 2004. Jacknife Lee produced it, and it's the record that finally carried the Northern Irish band beyond Northern Ireland and Scotland and into the mainstream.

It's the first Snow Patrol album with Nathan Connolly on lead guitar and the last with Mark McClelland on bass, and you can hear a band that's suddenly found its size. "Run" is the big one, a slow-building ballad that starts as a whisper and ends up as a stadium-sized plea, with guitars swelling up like a wave breaking. "Chocolate" is all jangle and urgency, a tumbling indie-rock rush, and "Spitting Games" snaps and crackles with nervy, jumpy energy.

The band drew 5 singles from it over the next 14 months, and in 2004 the album was reissued in the UK with a couple of bonus tracks before heading across the Atlantic. There was even a surround-sound version on SACD and DualDisc. A 20th anniversary edition came along on 4 August 2023, right on the dot.

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