This is Music: The Singles The Verve

Celebrate 20 years of This Is Music: The Singles, The Verve's definitive compilation of their timeless singles. Originally released in 2004, this compilation captured the band's finest moments, adding two previously unreleased tracks, “This Could Be My Moment” and “Monte Carlo,” from the Urban Hymns sessions. Now, for the first time ever, this iconic collection is available on vinyl, reissued under the direction of the band to include the full story of their music.

This updated edition replaces the 2004 bonus tracks with the singles from The Verve's 2008 reunion album Forth, featuring the anthemic “Love Is Noise” and “Rather Be,” and reinstates “She’s A Superstar” in its unedited, full-length glory. Tracing The Verve’s rise from shoegaze purveyors to arena-filling legends, the collection showcases their genre-defining sound—lush, cinematic, and deeply evocative.

Rediscover Ashcroft’s poignant lyrics and the band's psychedelic depth, culminating in Urban Hymns hits like “Bitter Sweet Symphony” and “The Drugs Don’t Work,” songs that resonated worldwide and solidified The Verve's status as one of the most influential bands of the 90s. With This Is Music on vinyl, fans can immerse themselves in the intensity and emotion that defined an era.

Originally released in November 2004 it featured 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.

Available to pre-order on special edition coloured vinyl now.

Released on February 14th 2025.