As we’re well into the season of big noises and energy, we wanted to go somewhere quiet this Sunday, and Laughing Stock contains some of the most beautifully quiet moments ever recorded to tape.

Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock is a perfect album. A misunderstood masterpiece that has grown in scope and reach over the last thirty years, with laudatory reappraisals from artists, publications, writers and broadcasters regularly bringing it to a new audience. When the album arrived in September 1991, it confounded expectations. The final statement from a band once aligned with synth-pop charts rejected verse–chorus conventions for immersive expanses of sound and silence. Recorded over seven months with no commercial agenda, the album charted modestly yet planted seeds that would quietly define post-rock and experimental music for decades.

Talk Talk began in the early 1980s as a synth-pop group, with their first two albums - The Party's Over (1982) and It's My Life (1984) charting in the top 40 and registering hit singles Talk Talk, Today and It's My Life. Their third album - The Colour of Spring (1986) - was a big transition away from synth-pop into more organic instrumentation and expansive arrangements. It would also prove to be - in no small part thanks to the smash single Life's What You Make It - their biggest commercial success and afford opportunities to experiment further. Their fourth album, Spirit of Eden (1988), marked a radical departure toward improvised sessions and genre fusion, and besides Mark Hollis’ emotive vocals and timbres, there was very little that connected the first and fourth albums, even though they were recorded just four years apart. This creative evolution set the stage for Laughing Stock, a remarkable work that distilled their commitment to artistic autonomy and sonic exploration.

Born from improvisational sessions, the musicians recorded fragments in long takes, which were later edited and assembled under Mark Hollis and long-term collaborator and producer Tim Friese-Greene’s direction. Reportedly, windowless studios and unusual lighting helped foster an introspective atmosphere, free of time constraints and commercial pressures. The result is a record that privileges sound texture, dynamic tension, and emotional resonance over conventional structure. The contemporary reaction was polarised, with early reviews both celebrating its ambition and questioning its accessibility. Its emphasis on space, silence, and texture helped inspire countless musicians who sought alternatives to mainstream frameworks. The album has rightfully been reappraised as a masterpiece of 20th-century music, a touchstone for post-rock and experimental artists.

Although the album would be followed in 1998 with the beautiful self-titled Mark Hollis solo LP - which has been criminally out of print for the majority of the last thirty years - Laughing Stock has always felt to me like a goodbye. Even with their biggest and brightest highs, Talk Talk always had such maudlin energy, and Laughing Stock is just a stunning crystallisation of that, the final whispers as it all fades to black.

From its extended opening of tape hiss, Laughing Stock never fails to create a spell. An enchanting experience every time.