Spiritualized's Let It Come Down turns 25, and it took 115 musicians

Spiritualized put out Let It Come Down on 17 September 2001, four years after Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space had turned them into a band critics and record buyers agreed on. Expectations were high. So were the doubts, and Under the Radar's Matthew Berlyant spends the record's 25th year on both.

The loudest question was whether Jason Pierce, who works as J Spaceman, could get anywhere near the feel of the earlier album without the players who made it. He had let three members of the band go in 1999, and they went off and formed Lupine Howl. What he did in response was take four years over the follow-up and put about 115 different musicians on it, including a full symphony orchestra and a gospel choir, chasing his own version of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound.

It remains the most ambitious and the most lushly produced rock record Spiritualized have made. The scale never swamped the writing. Out of Sight and The Straight and the Narrow carry the same emotional weight as the best of the album before them, and Berlyant rates both among the strongest songs Pierce has written, which is a high bar for a man whose career goes back to Spacemen 3 at the start of the 1980s.

The release date was an accident of scheduling, six days after the September 11 attacks, and the album's bleakness happened to fit the week it landed in. That is coincidence rather than intent, but it is part of why people who were there remember where they first heard it.

Elsewhere the record is plainly about Pierce himself. The Twelve Steps and Won't Get to Heaven (The State I'm In) deal with the substance problems he has never hidden, in terms open enough to travel to anyone stuck in something they cannot get out of. It closes with Lord Can You Hear Me?, the same song that closed Playing with Fire, the third Spacemen 3 album, in 1989. It stayed in Spiritualized's live sets for decades alongside Walking with Jesus and Take Me to the Other Side.

No reissue, box set or anniversary pressing has been announced to go with the date, so for now this is a piece of writing rather than a product. Anyone waiting on one can watch the release calendar. Anniversary reissues have been busy elsewhere this year: Jimmy Eat World took Bleed American back out on the road for its 25th, and Pig Destroyer's own basement record hit the same mark.

For a band whose reputation still rests heavily on the album before it, Let It Come Down has aged into something more than a difficult second act. The indie reappraisal is that it is the record where Pierce proved the sound was his rather than the band's.