This album is where Sade really showed they were in it for the long haul. It’s 1988 predecessor Stronger Than Pride already showed they could learn from advances in hip hop and other club music, and this one absolutely confirmed that they weren’t just “an 80s band” keeping up with the times but deserved to be seen as contemporaries of Soul II Soul, Smith & Mighty and Massive Attack in pushing a distinctively sophisticated Black / multicultural British sound forward. Sade Adu’s voice and the band’s songwriting were both maturing too, showing it wasn’t just their grooves evolving. But then, on top of all that, near the end of the album, there was “Pearls”: a song so advanced in everything — lyrics, arrangement, structure and all — that it has been sampled to Saturn and back in jungle, hip hop, electronica and the rest and still sounds like the future now. This was a band flexing virtually unlimited creative ambition.