The Back to Black anniversary reissue arrives on Friday, 23 October, twenty years after Amy Winehouse’s second album first appeared on 27 October 2006, according to Consequence. Republic/UMe will release the collection across a 3LP clear-vinyl edition, a 3CD edition, and a digital deluxe edition, bringing together four unreleased demos, rare B-sides, and a previously unheard live set recorded at Paradiso in Amsterdam.
That Winehouse is being celebrated at this scale, and with this level of archival care, is a measure of what the record continues to mean. Back to Black was, as Consequence notes, her final album before her death in 2011, and it remains one of the most emotionally and commercially durable British albums of its era.
What the Back to Black Anniversary Reissue Contains
The live recording, captured at Paradiso on 8 February 2007, has never previously been released in full on vinyl or streaming. According to Billboard, the 14-track set includes ‘Addicted’, ‘Cherry’, a medley of ‘He Can Only Hold Her’ and Lauryn Hill’s ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’, ‘I Heard Love Is Blind’ and ‘Wake Up Alone’. It is a set list that reads less like a greatest-hits pass through the album and more like a proper band show, rooted in the soul and jazz vocabulary Winehouse had been developing since Frank.
The second disc, Billboard reports, carries a BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge cover of the Zutons’ ‘Valerie’ and her collaboration with Ghostface Killah on a version of ‘I’m No Good (You Know I’m No Good)’. The ‘Valerie’ cover, of course, became something of a signature in its own right, later re-recorded with Mark Ronson as a standalone release. Having it here, in its rawer Live Lounge form, restores a sense of how loose and immediate those sessions could feel.
The 3LP and 3CD editions also feature brand-new alternative cover artwork built around an image of Winehouse’s handwritten lyrics from Ronson’s archives, never-before-seen photographs by original album photographers Mischa Richter and Alex Lake, and new liner notes from Ronson and Salaam Remi.
Ronson, Remi and the Record That Still Refuses to Age
‘It’s crazy that six songs made in a fit of furious musical infatuation would matter so deeply to so many people twenty years later,’ Ronson said. The phrase ‘furious musical infatuation’ is an apt one for an album that sounded, in 2006, as though it had been conjured rather than constructed: a record obsessed with its own emotional world, pulling from sixties girl-group production, Southern soul and jazz phrasing simultaneously.
Remi’s tribute is warmer in register. ‘Amy was one of one,’ he said. ‘One-of-a-kind artist. One-of-a-kind spirit. One-of-a-kind soul. Experiencing that level of talent, passion, humour, honesty, and love for what she created was a gift.’
Back to Black debuted at No. 3 on the Official Albums Chart before reaching No. 1 and going on to become the best-selling album of 2007 in the UK. In the United States, it debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 before peaking at No. 2 following Winehouse’s five-Grammy haul at the 2008 ceremony, where she won Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance with ‘Rehab’.
In 2025, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry as a ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ work, placing it alongside a canon of American recordings that the institution has deemed worth protecting for posterity. That an album made in London by a British artist sits comfortably in that company says something about the reach Back to Black achieved.
Limited-edition 1LP versions of the original album are also part of the release, including a ‘Chalkboard Marble’ colour-vinyl edition and a webstore-exclusive Zoetrope vinyl. The full range is available via Universal Music, with the Back to Black anniversary reissue set to arrive on 23 October.
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