The Verve - This is Music: The Singles

This is Music: The Singles, is a compilation album by The Verve originally released in November 2004 featuring two non-singles, tracks pulled from the sessions for their third album Urban Hymns, ‘This Could Be My Moment’ and ‘Monte Carlo’.

2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of an album that has never been pressed on vinyl and, under the group’s direction, this long overdue reissue replaces the bonus tracks with the powerful singles from the band’s 2008 reunion album, Forth – ‘Love is Noise’ and ‘Rather Be’ – as well as  including their second single ‘She’s A Superstar’ (1992) in its original, full-length, eight-and-a-half-minute form (rather than the five-minute edit). As such, the album now represents the complete story of The Verve’s singles.

Named after the band’s sixth single, the first issued from their second album, A Northern Soul, it brilliantly documents the potency of The Verve’s relatively short but epoch-making journey through the musical cosmos.

On their emergence (when they were known simply as Verve), they were frequently referred to as purveyors of the shoegaze sound, although their output was more expansive, cinematic and genuinely psychedelic than that description implies, as evidenced by their first three non-album singles/EPs, all of which reached the summit of the UK indie charts.

After splitting up for the first time in 1995, they reconvened (with the addition of guitarist and keyboard player Simon Tong) to reach their commercial peak in 1997 with the hugely successful Urban Hymns, which was centred around a brilliantly accomplished suite of songs written by Ashcroft, including the worldwide smash ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, the UK number one ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ and the beautiful and evocative ‘Lucky Man’.

Combustible, intense and highly influential, this stellar journey is finally available on wax, where, in its definitive form, it easily stands comparison with any other singles collection from the last three decades.