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Mar 06, 2025 By Mark Redfern

Alternate Tracklist is our new series where we take an album and rework its tracklist into a new Spotify playlist. For our first one, we have reworked The Verve’s 1997 classic third album, Urban Hymns, taking out some tracks; adding in some B-sides, remixes, and alternate versions; and changing the tracklist order around. Check out our new version of the album below.

When it was originally released, some fans of the band’s first two albums—1993’s A Storm in Heaven (which has a shoegazing/dream-pop vibe) and 1995’s A Northern Soul (which had a heavier psych-rock sound but also fit in with the Britpop movement)—were a bit taken aback by the amount of ballads and radio-friendly singles on Urban Hymns. So we’ve taken out two of the ballads (“One Day” and “Velvet Morning”) and added in some of the more rock B-sides (“Stamped,” “Echo Bass,” and “Three Steps”). We also switched out the album version of “Bittersweet Symphony” for the superior “Extended Version,” which is almost two minutes longer and was included in the single release for the song. We moved “Lucky Man” to track two, so that the two most iconic songs from the album now open it, and moved the ballad “Sonnet” to later in the album. We also included the James Lavelle (of UNKLE) remix of “Bittersweet Symphony” later in the tracklist as a call back to the opener and also did the same with an alternate B-side version of “Lucky Man.” “Monte Carlo,” an outtake from the Urban Hymns sessions that was included as a bonus track on 2004’s This Is Music: The Singles, was also worked into the tracklist. Finally, the affecting string-laden ballad “Never Wanna See You Cry,” one of the B-sides to “Lucky Man,” was added as the penultimate track. The album still ends with “Come On” and its short hidden bonus track “Deep Freeze.” We’re not saying this is a better version of the album, just a different one.

Urban Hymns is one of the best selling albums of all-time in the UK and sold over 10 million copies worldwide. “Bittersweet Symphony” remains the band’s signature song and is one of the greatest songs of the 1990s, if not of the whole 20th century. The band broke up in 1999, two years after the album’s release, but reformed in 2007 for their fourth and final album, Forth, before breaking up again in 2009. Frontman Richard Ashcroft has since released several solo albums.

We hope to do this with other albums, but will be limited to those bands who released a lot of B-sides or did deluxe editions with bonus tracks, and all those tracks being available on Spotify. So it’ll be mainly albums from the ’80s and especially the ’90s (the golden age of the B-side).

Read our 2008 interview with The Verve.

Read our retrospective feature on The Verve’s A Storm in Heaven in honor of its 30th anniversary.

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