Urban Hymns by The Verve

Urban Hymns, the Verve's third album, came out on Hut Records on 29 September 1997, and it's a small miracle it happened at all. The band had split while promoting A Northern Soul in August 1995 and reformed a fortnight later without guitarist Nick McCabe. Richard Ashcroft retreated to Bath to make demos, Simon Tong joined, sessions with John Leckie and Owen Morris went nowhere, and Bernard Butler lasted just a week before creative differences sent him packing. Recording at Olympic Studios in London finally got going in 1996 with producer Youth, then engineer Chris Potter, and when Ashcroft invited McCabe back in early 1997, several songs were cut again to make room for his guitar.

What came out is huge, soaring and bruised. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" rides a sweeping string loop into something majestic, though its use of a Rolling Stones sample sparked a dispute over the songwriting credits. "The Drugs Don't Work" is a hushed, devastating ballad that went to number one in the UK, "Lucky Man" glows warmly, and "Sonnet" is a gentle, swaying beauty.

It topped the charts in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Sweden, sold 250,000 copies in its first week and has gone 11-times platinum in the UK. At the 1998 Brit Awards it won Best Album, with Youth and Potter sharing Best Producer. The band played to 40,000 people at Haigh Hall in Wigan in May 1998, then, after a US tour and a show at Slane Castle, broke up again.

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