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**Saint Etienne - So Tough**
★★★★☆

While Saint Etienne never truly broke up in the conventional sense, their journey from the crystalline perfection of "So Tough" to their later experimental wanderings feels like watching a beautiful relationship slowly drift apart before finding its way back together. The trio—Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and the ethereally voiced Sarah Cracknell—have spent decades proving that their 1993 masterpiece wasn't just a fluke, but rather the blueprint for a career spent chasing the perfect pop moment.

Today, "So Tough" stands as a monument to early '90s sophistication, a record that predicted the coffee shop culture explosion while soundtracking it with the kind of effortless cool that makes you want to move to London immediately. It's the album that launched a thousand indie pop bands and convinced an entire generation that sampling could be as romantic as a handwritten love letter.

The standout tracks read like a greatest hits collection from an alternate universe where pop music never lost its way. "You're in a Bad Way" remains their calling card—a swirling confection of disco strings, house beats, and Cracknell's butter-wouldn't-melt vocals that somehow makes heartbreak sound like the most glamorous thing in the world. It's followed closely by "Hobart Paving," a seven-minute odyssey that shouldn't work but absolutely does, building from ambient whispers to a euphoric climax that feels like falling in love with a city at 3 AM.

"Avenue" showcases the band's magpie tendencies at their most refined, lifting a Neil Young sample and transforming it into something entirely their own—a trick they'd repeat throughout the album with the confidence of master craftsmen. Meanwhile, "Railway Jam" proves that Saint Etienne could do straight-ahead dance music without sacrificing an ounce of their identity, all stuttering beats and dreamy vocals that sound like Kraftwerk covering The Ronettes.

The album's musical DNA is pure early '90s alchemy—house music's four-four thump filtered through indie pop's melodic sensibilities and dressed up in the kind of retro-futuristic production that made everything sound like it was beamed in from a more stylish decade. Stanley and Wiggs, both former music journalists, brought an encyclopedic knowledge of pop history to their sampling and production choices, while Cracknell's voice provided the human warmth that prevented their sonic experiments from feeling coldly academic.

This wasn't just indie dance or ambient house or any other genre tag critics tried to pin on them—it was pure Saint Etienne, a sound that borrowed liberally from disco, Krautrock, '60s girl groups, and early house music while somehow sounding completely original. The production, handled largely by the band themselves, has that expensive-sounding sheen that characterized the best dance music of the era, all crisp programmed drums and lush synthesizer washes that seem to shimmer and breathe.

The album emerged from the fertile UK music scene of the early '90s, when the lines between indie rock, dance music, and pop were delightfully blurred. Saint Etienne had already established themselves as ones to watch with their previous releases, but "So Tough" was their quantum leap—the moment when their vision fully crystallized and their influences coalesced into something undeniably their own.

The band formed from the friendship between Stanley and Wiggs, two music obsessives who shared a love of both obscure Northern Soul singles and cutting-edge house music. Their early singles featured various guest vocalists before Cracknell joined as a permanent member, bringing not just her distinctive voice but a visual presence that completed their aesthetic puzzle.

"So Tough" arrived at the perfect cultural moment—dance music was infiltrating the mainstream, indie bands were embracing electronic elements, and there was a hunger for music that was both intelligent and immediately pleasurable. Saint Etienne delivered exactly that, creating an album that worked equally well in headphones and on dancefloors, in bedrooms and in clubs.

Nearly thirty years later, "So Tough" hasn't aged so much as it's revealed new layers of sophistication. It's an album that taught a generation of musicians that you could be both populist and experimental, that sampling could be an art form, and that the best pop music doesn't talk down to its audience—it invites them into a more beautiful world. In an era of increasingly fragmented musical tribes, Saint Etienne created something for everyone, and somehow made it look ef