The Verve "Urban Hymns"

Urban Hymns is the third studio album by English alternative rock band The Verve, released on 29 September 1997 on Hut Records. It earned nearly unanimous critical praise upon its release, and went on to become the band's best-selling release and one of the biggest selling albums of the year. As of 2015, Urban Hymns is ranked the 19th best-selling album in UK chart history and has sold over ten million copies worldwide.

The album features the hit singles "Bitter Sweet Symphony", "Lucky Man" and UK number one "The Drugs Don't Work". The critical and commercial success of the album saw the band win two Brit Awards in 1998, including Best British Group, and appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in April 1998. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song.

The Verve had previously released two albums, A Storm in Heaven in 1993 and A Northern Soul in 1995. The band had only achieved moderate commercial success up to that point, and the band split shortly after their second album due to internal conflicts. Vocalist Richard Ashcroft quickly reformed the group, with Simon Tong, an old friend of the band on guitar, however Ashcroft realised Nick McCabe's unique guitar style was required to complete the true Verve unit and later asked him to return. Tong also remained adding more guitar and keyboard/organ textures, making them a five-piece band and expanding their sound.

The four-piece had already recorded several tracks for the album with Youth as producer, but once McCabe returned they re-recorded several tracks and changed producers to Chris Potter. McCabe said that in the next seven months of work, "... the key tracks were recorded from scratch, but some of them were already there."

The cover photo was taken in Richmond Park, London by photographer Brian Cannon, who was also responsible for the artwork of the band's previous two albums. Cannon said that the simplicity of the image was because Ashcroft simply wanted fans to "listen to the fucking record".

The Verve were known for their music's complex, immersive sonic textures. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and remains the band's most well-known song. "The Drugs Don't Work", the band's only number one single in the UK, became a concert staple for jam bands and other groups.[citation needed]

The rest of the album alternated between wistful ballads like "Sonnet" and "Space and Time" (written by Richard Ashcroft), spacey grooves like "Catching the Butterfly" and "The Rolling People", all-out rockers like the pounding "Come On" (which existed in demo from the "Northern Soul" era) and psychedelic driven songs like "Neon Wilderness". The hidden track "Deep Freeze" features distorted guitars and a baby's cry sound. It has strong ambient influences that set it apart from the rest of the tracks in terms of composition and overall mood.

Urban Hymns received widespread critical praise upon its release. Melody Maker hailed it as "an album of unparalleled beauty so intent on grabbing at the strands of music's multi-hued history". Ted Kessler of NME praised Urban Hymns as the band's best album to date, adding that its first five songs alone "pound all other guitar albums this year – bar Radiohead's OK Computer – into the ground with their emotional ferocity and deftness of melodic touch." Similarly, Rolling Stone critic David Fricke deemed it "a defiantly psychedelic record — soaked in slipstream guitars and breezy strings, cruising at narcotic-shuffle velocity — about coping and crashing". The Los Angeles Times' Sara Scribner noted its "lush, intricate, ethereal sound" and felt that The Verve had "delivered an achingly beautiful record that's just desperate enough to never get boring."

In a more mixed assessment, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune felt that Urban Hymns was lacking in enough songs as memorable as "Bitter Sweet Symphony" and "The Drugs Don't Work" to justify the album's long length. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice cited the latter track as a "choice cut", indicating a good song on "an album that isn't worth your time or money."

Urban Hymns spent 12 weeks at the top of the UK Albums Chart, with a total of 124 weeks on the chart. It also became The Verve's first charting album in the United States, where it debuted at number 63 on the Billboard 200, giving the band their first commercial success in the country. Urban Hymns ultimately peaked at number 23 on the chart and was certified Platinum by the RIAA on 4 April 1998; it remains the group's best-selling album in the United States to date, with over 1.3 million copies sold as of 2009.