The Verve made Urban Hymns coming off a breakup. They had split in 1995. Nick McCabe came back on guitar just before the sessions, and the album, their third, was recorded with that tension unresolved. None of the strain reads as weakness. It reads as scale. This is a big record, strings and slow builds and a singer who sounds certain of every line, and it became the band’s biggest by a distance.

Released 29 September 1997, it gave them three singles that defined the year: the sweeping lead single built on a borrowed string loop, the steady ache of “The Drugs Don’t Work,” and “Lucky Man.” Two of those reached the top of the British charts.

What the sales never showed was the legal storm gathering around its most famous song, a dispute over who actually owned it that would run for years. Open it up. The fight is in the credits, not the grooves.