The Colour of Spring by Talk Talk

The Colour of Spring, Talk Talk's third album, arrived on 17 February 1986, and it's the record where Mark Hollis started pulling the plug on the synthesizers. He wrote it with producer Tim Friese-Greene, and the keyboards that had carried the band's early synth-pop mostly give way to guitar, piano and organ, with jazz and art pop seeping in at the edges. Paul Webb was still on bass and Lee Harris on drums.

It sounds warmer and stranger than anything they had done before: songs that breathe, swell and hang in the air instead of pumping along. It also turned out to be their biggest commercial success, with Life's What You Make It and Living in Another World as hit singles, a number eight showing in the UK and a spell at the top in the Netherlands. Spirit of Eden, the next stop, would push much further out.

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