The Cure: every album ranked in order of greatness

Never let it be said that The Cure aren’t a laugh, and they certainly tried to paint on a lipstick smile with ‘Wild Mood Swings’ – an album befitting of its name. Things were a little up in the air for The Cure back in 1996. Smith once joked that the band had a different drummer every week, to the point where he’d forget who was behind the kit. The result is a disjointed hot mess, as the pendulum swings between genres and moods via jazz, pop, psych and some tropical flavours. It made for a pretty confusing dance towards the end of the century. A reset was required. (AT)

There is a difference between something being difficult and it being a slog. Made with Ross Robinson, whose extreme methods while making KoRn’s early records produced the gnarled blueprints for nu-metal, ‘The Cure’ is abrasive and texturally adventurous but doesn’t land many melodic blows. In fact, it feels like a lot of build-up and not a lot of release. Some of it is pretty gnarly – see the scuzzy, spiralling ‘Labyrinth’ – but it doesn’t go far enough. Despite the promise present in its meeting of minds, there is nothing here to match the potency of The Cure left to their own devices as kids. (HB)

Ah, the great big comma before the most pregnant of pauses. The last Cure album for 16 years certainly felt like it might be the last, during that decade of tantric teasing before we were promised comeback LP ‘Songs Of A Lost World’, and it more than holds up. From the dizzy love of ‘The Only One’ to the twitching darkness of ‘Sleep When I’m Dead’ (the latter dating back to ‘The Head On The Door’), ‘4:13 Dream’ remains a pure Cure album. It ain’t peak Smith, but it’s certainly been enough to leave us wanting more. (AT)

A real curio. Composed and recorded while Smith was pulling double duty with Siouxsie And The Banshees, ‘The Top’ has a spikily playful presence unlike anything else in the Cure catalogue. Uncovering a seam of psychedelia in his writing, Smith used it to fashion both the fluttering sophisti-pop of ‘The Caterpillar’ and the oddly nauseating squelch of ‘Dressing Up’, which feels entirely contemporary even now. Stay for the thrilling, mechanised thud of ‘Shake Dog Shake’, leave before ‘The Empty World’ lets you know what Jona Lewie’s ‘Stop The Cavalry’ would sound like if it had been sucked inside out. (HB)

Known as the third in The Cure’s dark triptych alongside ‘Pornography’ and ‘Disintegration’ (with all three records later collected together for the 2003 live album ‘Trilogy’), ‘Bloodflowers’ is “thematically linked” to those go-to Cure albums, according to Smith, in being introspective, personal, pretty bloody heavy and really darn good. It’s far from an ‘80s goth-pop pastiche, mind. Here are a band using their knack for widescreen, earth-scorching, open-heart post-punk to implant them in the 21st Century, weaving that spider’s web for the likes of Interpol, The xx, Foals and more to climb. (AT)

Assembled at a time when The Cure were one of the world’s biggest bands and (temporarily) removed from the imminent threat of implosion, ‘Wish’ poses a complex question: is it enough for the songs to be good? For most bands, the answer would be: sure. For The Cure post-‘Disintegration’? Maybe not. This is a beautifully rendered and artfully performed record that’s entirely suited to filling the enormodomes they had graduated to playing, but, as a result, it lacks the danger, the lacerating emotions, of their finest work. Here, The Cure fell to a level of performance most bands couldn’t hope of reaching. (HB)

Influenced by Smith’s first, brief stint playing with Siouxsie And The Banshees and the introduction of bassist Simon Gallup, whose approach offered a potent combination of feel and muscularity, much of ‘Seventeen Seconds’ is a profound bummer that you can still dance to. But, swerving away from the choppier sounds of their debut, it’s also The Cure’s first real foray into manipulating sound and atmosphere, leading to the skipping ‘Play For Today’ sharing space with the morose instrumental ‘Three’. Arriving less than a year after ‘Three Imaginary Boys’, this was a vital evolutionary step that many bands would have needed a lot more time to take. (HB)

Long before the lipstick, the big hair and the Tim Burton theatrics, The Cure emerged as the scrappy power-pop trio of Smith, bassist Michael Dempsey and drummer Lol Tolhurst. You can hear their early punk influences of The Clash and Buzzcocks on the formative new wave of ‘Accuracy’, ‘Grinding Halt’ and ‘So What’ and it’s enough to send The Jam running to the nearest tube for cover (unfortunate for Paul Weller, he’s, erm, not a fan…). But see beyond the rough edges of their Jimi Hendrix cover of ‘Foxy Lady’, and laying among the gems of ‘10:15 Saturday Night’ and the title track are the band that would go on to masterfully smash pop with melancholy like no other. It’s still a romp of a debut and a thoroughly enjoyable listen. (AT)

‘Faith’ is a record written by someone who thinks ‘What does it all mean?’ and ‘What’s the point?’ are the same question. The band’s third album found Smith and his bandmates reflecting on death and the existential despair that accompanies the tipping point of entering your 20s. It is a bleak, unforgiving work that, once you tune into its low hum of hopelessness, is also frequently beautiful, from the meditative synths of ‘All Cats Are Grey’ to the pleading final throes of ‘The Holy Hour’. It’s interesting to wonder how much of an influence the sleeve – none more grey – had on setting expectations for a truly oppressive listening experience. (HB)

An easy stick to beat double albums with is that they spend too much time colouring outside the lines, but on ‘Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’, that’s the whole point. Reflecting an unusually collaborative approach to writing, with Smith fielding demo ideas from his bandmates, here you’ll find icy post-punk, lilting acoustic-pop and rapid-fire indie-rock rubbing shoulders with foreboding sound collages. The real fun is found in getting lost amid it all, wandering between the extremes of ‘Icing Sugar’’s string-led panic attack and the butterfly-stomach power-pop of ‘Just Like Heaven’, which is as perfect today as it was almost 40 years ago. (HB)

The one you’ve all been waiting for is finally here. An excruciating 16 years in the making, ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ was shaped by Smith taking stock of life and love after losing his father, mother and brother all in quick succession. The result is arguably his most personal record to date, one that dives into the band’s 40-plus years to create a work of real emotional depth; a whole universe of sound, but one that can only be their own. You can forgive them for taking their time on this, as it feels so thoroughly considered and as full a picture as you could hope for. As NME recently concluded: “Mortality may loom, but there’s colour in the black and flowers on the grave.” (AT)

The Cure at their most poptastic, ‘The Head On The Door’ should come with a government warning for its spoils of utter bangers. Strutting out of the darkness of their earlier work, the band’s sixth album throws open the curtains to let in the crisp winter sun and light up the glitterball. There are still traces of their menace in the likes of ‘Kyoto Song’, ‘A Night Like This’ and ‘Sinking’, but it’s the likes of ‘In Between Days’, ‘Close To Me’, ‘Six Different Ways’ and ‘Push’ that showed what this band were capable of when they lept out of the coffin and onto the arena stage. (AT)

‘Pornography’ is one of those records that sits on your chest, heavy and unmoving. Recorded in a spiral of drugs, depression and desperation, it is horrifying both musically and lyrically, fusing unrelenting gloom with a proto-industrial attitude towards synths to essentially create goth-rock. It is difficult and uncompromising – see the way the melodies on ‘One Hundred Years’ are swamped by the dirge – while smashing down walls, suggesting to a generation of young musicians that they didn’t have to rein in their more extreme impulses. It remains a singular piece of art that doesn’t offer an easy way out – you will stare into the void, and you will like it. (HB)

Let’s not muck about when it comes to God-tier albums. Off the back of the pure pop one-two punch of ‘The Head On The Door’ into ‘Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’, The Cure had become high-rolling ‘80s icons and dons of MTV. Even David Bowie admitted that he got bitten by the bug and went all Phil Collins to churn out the cheese and rake in the cash back then, but The Cure ended that decade with an era-defying but identity-defining album.

From the pure aching grace of opener ‘Plainsong’ (the best Cure song in this writer’s opinion – come fight me, goth nerds), via the inverted romance of ‘Lovesong’, simmering horrorshow of ‘Fascination Street’, and the opulent nightmare of ‘The Same Deep Nightmare As As You’, ‘Disintegration’ flips pop on its head and mixes it with post-rock soundscapes to paint love and life in a fully three-dimensional form; a warm hug from the cold.

And come on: ‘Pictures Of You’? ‘Lullaby’? ‘Prayers For Rain’? It runs like a ‘best of’ album. It’s that bittersweet essence and star-reaching personality of the band bottled in one 72-minute dose. It’s not only the best album by The Cure but a strong contender for one of the best albums of all time. Flawless and timeless. (AT)