Sade’s discography has no sharp pivots or seismic reinventions, but there are plenty of slight tweaks and shifts. On Stronger Than Pride, self-produced after collaborator Robin Millar went blind during the recording of Promise, the English band began to whittle down their sound. Dispensing with the nightclub swing and louche, haunted characters of Diamond Life and Promise, Sade’s third album turned the band’s elegant, composed music into meditation, exploring romance as an interior experience.
After releasing and touring their first two records in quick succession, the band took a breather for Stronger Than Pride. Written in Spain and London and then recorded in France and the Bahamas over the course of a year, the album took shape casually. Guitarist and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman recalled it as the first time the band composed songs piecemeal rather than as a collective, an approach perceptible in the looseness of the compositions. The album is a breezy, unrushed affair, where songs loop back in on themselves, sway in place, and fizzle out. Sade doesn’t do outright jams, but “Keep Looking” and “Give It Up” come close, locking into grooves and letting the melodies leisurely unfurl. The latter even features some horn blasts—practically an indulgence, given the band’s tendency toward restraint and poise. While Sade doesn’t reinvent itself on Stronger Than Pride, it does unwind.
The music on Stronger Than Pride is reduced on all fronts: softer rhythms, lighter melodies, fleeter verses. “I wanted it to be more basic and less embellished, with the quiet songs quieter and the harder songs harder,” band leader Sade Adu said at the time. The record isn’t as minimal as that quote suggests (especially when compared to the ethereal, hollowed-out mood music of Love Deluxe), but it is certainly sparse. The arrangement on lithe title track “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” is open like a cloudless sky, carried by a patter of keys, percussion, and pan flute that drift around Sade’s airy voice. As she sings of a love that endures a betrayal, the weightlessness of the arrangements sells her candor. “I still really, really love you,” she croons.
Adu maintains the directness and simplicity of the title track throughout the record. Her writing is noticeably less scenic and moody, treating love as more of a concept than an embodied experience. “To turn my back on you/Now would I turn my back on me?” she asks on the dubby “Turn My Back on You,” perhaps the only Sade song that could be described as hard. “Give it up, give it all” on “Give It Up” is delivered less like a steamy bedroom command and more like a call to prayer. Compared to the glitz and melodrama of hits like “Smooth Operator,” “Is It a Crime?”and “Jezebel,” these songs don’t have much sizzle or flair. But there is an emotional clarity to these spare lyrics—a cleanness almost, as if Adu has rinsed them in cold water.