This Far

THIS FAR: THE COMPLETE CATALOG AS ARGUMENT

Sade’s This Far (2020) is the first complete vinyl retrospective of the band’s six-studio-album canon, pressed on 180-gram black vinyl and half-speed mastered at Abbey Road Studios — a release that functions less as nostalgia and more as a formal, unhurried assertion of catalog permanence.
In 2020, Sony Music issued This Far as the band’s first complete vinyl discography box set, encompassing all six studio albums in remastered form, released on October 9, 2020 as an anniversary-spanning overview of Sade’s career from 1984 to 2010.
The packaging is deliberate, the mastering process methodical, and the implicit statement is architectural: this is a body of work that was always meant to be heard as a whole.

The Mastering Argument: Half-Speed, No Limiting, No Apology

A retrospective box set lives or dies by the integrity of its audio decisions. Here, the methodology is specific enough to warrant genuine scrutiny.
The band and Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios worked from high-resolution digital transfers of the stereo master mixes, remastered at half-speed using Showell’s own unique restored Neumann VMS80 cutting lathe to perform the twelve sides of vinyl lacquer cuts.
That instrument — a restored Neumann VMS80 — is not a marketing detail. Half-speed mastering on a lathe of that caliber allows the cutter head to track high-frequency information with reduced phase error, resulting in cleaner transients and a more faithful reconstruction of stereo width. The choice to use no additional digital limiting compounds this:
no additional digital limiting was used in the mastering process, so the six albums benefit from the advantage of extra clarity and pure fidelity, preserving the dynamic range of the original mixes for the very first time.

What this means practically, when you sit with Love Deluxe at side-one volume, is that “Cherish the Day” breathes differently than on any CD pressing.
Andrew Hale’s pads and Sade’s first verse and chorus keep the song moving for the first minute and a half until a guitar slide and Paul Denman’s bassline come in
— and in this pressing, that entrance carries spatial weight that compressed transfers routinely flatten. Stuart Matthewman’s guitar work on Stronger Than Pride similarly benefits: the dry pluck in “Paradise” and the alto sax modulation on “Turn My Back on You” resolve with a precision that speaks directly to the lathe’s low-distortion high-frequency capability.

That said, critical response among audiophiles has been divided. A vocal contingent of high-end listeners noted that certain pressings — particularly Diamond Life — exhibit subtle pitch inconsistencies against original first-press masters.
Specifically, “Smooth Operator” appears slightly slower compared to original Italian first-press masters, a discrepancy confirmed against digital files on streaming platforms where the version in the collection plays at a marginally lower pitch.
This is not a trivial complaint in a product priced as a premium artifact. The issue speaks to a broader tension in half-speed reissues: the process is exacting, but it presupposes that the source transfer is itself without error.
The box set title, This Far, suggests that the band’s studio work may not yet be fully complete
— a subtle promise embedded in the nomenclature that partially offsets any frustration with what’s here. You can experience Sade’s complete studio discography in a similar analog-soul register via the catalog page at Get Music’s Sade artist page.

Six Albums, One Voice: Songwriting Continuity Across Three Decades

What This Far makes unavoidable — by placing all six records in sequence — is how consistent Sade’s compositional logic has been across thirty-six years of releases. The band writes in a modal pocket where minor tonality rarely resolves to crisis. Sade Adu’s vocal register sits low in the throat, leaning on chest resonance rather than head voice, which means her melodic lines tend to move by step rather than leap. This is not a constraint; it’s a structural choice. The suppression of histrionics is the music’s central argument.

Diamond Life‘s lyricism — “Smooth Operator,” “Your Love Is King” — establishes the template: desire rendered as observation, not supplication. The narrator surveys rather than pleads. By Love Deluxe (1992), the writing has grown more interior, less urban-jazz and more intimate chamber soul. “Pearls” and “No Ordinary Love” operate in adjacent emotional registers but arrive at their affect through restraint — what goes unsaid in a Sade lyric frequently carries more weight than what is declared.
Most of all, Sade matters because their songs’ lovelorn lyrics reflected encounters with romance, longing, heartache and other matters of the heart, with a musical backdrop that sounded as adult as newfound feelings.

The ten-year gap between Lovers Rock (2000) and Soldier of Love (2010) reads differently in box set format than it does as a chronological wait. In sequence, the progression from the organic warmth of Lovers Rock to the drum-machine severity of Soldier of Love — where programmed percussion carries a martial formality absent from earlier records — feels less like a stylistic rupture and more like a deliberate hardening of emotional tone. The title track’s descending minor figure and Adu’s lower, slightly worn timbre in 2010 contrast starkly with the smoother head register of “Hang On to Your Love” from 1984. The arc is one of reduction: fewer harmonic movements, more space between notes, greater weight per word.
The quartet does not do collaborations — none of its six albums uses any guest features — despite overtures from the likes of Drake,
which is both an artistic statement and an insistence on self-enclosure that the box set formalizes.

Maxwell borrowed Sade songwriter-producer Stuart Matthewman to create his 1996 classic Urban Hang Suite, and Sade’s albums cast a shadow over neo-soul in general.
That shadow stretches forward as well: the quiet-storm chord language Matthewman established on Promise can be heard in the melodic construction of artists like Rhye and Jessie Ware, whose relationship with vulnerability and space owes a clear structural debt.