As of this writing, Songs Of A Lost World isn’t just the most critically acclaimed Cure album of all time. It’s the most critically acclaimed Cure album by such an insurmountable margin that you’d think it’s the only critically acclaimed Cure album. According to Metacritic, it’s second only to Brat in 2024. Conversely, though Apple Music recently named Disintegration, the band’s consensus masterpiece, one of the 100 best albums ever made, it clocked in at No. 39 in the 1989 Pazz & Jop poll, right behind Don Henley and Aerosmith’s Pump.
And so a more honest or accurate survey of The Cure’s greatness might focus on singles or deep cuts or their many compilations instead; I won’t argue with anyone who discovered The Cure from Staring At The Sea and still views their first Greatest Hits as a definitive work. Just look at that tracklist! Is there anything that isn’t a 10/10? Meanwhile, Rolling Stone once claimed that “Cure albums tend to leak filler like an attic spilling insulation,” and that was 24 years ago, meaning that they were probably including The Head On The Door; Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me; and/or Disintegration in that assessment. And while All Music Guide tends to be very generous with legacy bands, they’ve deemed not a single Cure LP worthy of a five-star designation.
Yet, the imperfect nature of The Cure’s albums tends to make listmaking a more exciting proposition than one for a band with readily understood hierarchies — from start to finish, nearly all of them feature canonical pop songs and hidden gems, batsh*t experiments, and throwaways that even Robert Smith has forgotten. They’ve existed in flux at nearly every point in their 45 years, as Robert Smith has threatened to break up The Cure, or at the very least, replace half of the band. For every album we’ve actually heard since Disintegration, Smith has promised at least three times as many. People can and will shape their entire personality around the sonic character of one Cure album and hone that personality around disliking the other ones. If you’re that type of person, you’ll probably either love or loathe my unscientific ranking, but in true Cure fan fashion, you’ll feel it deeply.
14. 4:13 Dream (2008)
Squint and the outline of a solid, if not spectacular, Cure album emerges, the kind they could’ve reliably dropped every four years or so since 2008 instead of following Robert Smith’s “promise three albums, deliver none” plan. Opener “Underneath The Stars” refurbishes “Plainsong” with glistening digital reverb and ticky-tack drum machines, “Sirensong” adds “country shuffle” to the arsenal, while singles “Freakshow” and “Sleep When I’m Dead” did their job of jazzing up 2008 setlists before going the way of “The End Of The World” and “Maybe Someday” into early retirement. Or, squint a little harder and 4:13 Dream is the work of an AI bot trained entirely on Join The Dots. Having no particular agenda aside from “hey, here’s a Cure album” (or, compressing the living sh*t out of 25 guitar tracks on each song), 4:13 Dream begs the question, “Who really wants solid, if not spectacular, from the Cure anyways?” Something’s gotta occupy this spot, but hey, at least it’s the only Cure album where Robert Smith spent the press cycle talking about how much he enjoyed making it.
13. The Cure (2004)
In the fall of 2004, The Cure joined Metallica, Aerosmith, and Janet Jackson as the fourth and final honoree of the short-lived mtv:ICON multimedia extravaganza. It’s literally a lifetime achievement award, but unlike their three predecessors, The Cure were also riding a wave of contemporary influence on vast swaths of radio rock that superficially sounded nothing like them. To wit, they were paid tribute by Blink-182 (a year removed from proving their newfound art-rock ambitions with a Robert Smith cameo on “All Of This”), Deftones, AFI, and… uh, Razorlight. If there ever was a time to reestablish themselves as a vital band, it was on The Cure.
At first glance, they understood the assignment by hiring Ross Robinson, not just the producer behind Korn, Iowa, and Relationship Of Command, but also someone notorious for pushing bands to the brink of madness in the studio; this was obviously not a deterrent for a guy like Robert Smith, who threatens to break up the Cure after basically every album. Yet, not even the most optimistic of Korn or Cure fans could imagine a more stunning start of their nü era as “Lost,” an impossibly tense sludgefeast where Smith sings like he’s trying to break out of a straitjacket. If not the best song they’ve made in the 21st century, it’s easily the most compelling Smith vocal performance. Perhaps it was too much to ask of an entire album in that mode, though “Labyrinth” does make a game attempt at sustaining the mood. Instead… we got a fairly straightforward collection of forgettable variations on “pop Cure” (“The End Of The World,” “I Don’t Know What’s Going On”) and “moody Cure” (“alt.end,” “The Promise”), tied to 2004 not just by its production, but “Us Or Them,” an anti-War On Terror PSA that’s a first-ballot candidate for the worst song to ever appear on a Cure album.
12. Wild Mood Swings (1996)
We’ve had enough laughs at this album’s expense over the past 28 years, so let’s ask ourselves: how do we salvage Wild Mood Swings? One can argue it was doomed by the salsafied lead single “The 13th,” a giddy genre experiment in the lineage of curios like “The Lovecats” or “The Caterpillar” that had no chance to thrive in the post-grunge doldrums of 1996 alt-rock radio. Then again, I’d take it any day over “Mint Car,” which reeked of damage control, or, “what if Robert Smith had to write a ‘happy’ Cure song in ten minutes?” Maybe we cut out a couple tracks at the end that reinforce its victimhood of the typical mid-’90s, CD-stuffing bloat (another detail tying it to its era: guitarist Porl Thompson left to join Page & Plant). Or, maybe just change the album title, which does little to contradict the general consensus that The Cure were verging on self-parody.
Or, since we’re working purely in hypotheticals, imagine an alternate reality where Wild Mood Swings is the exact thing a collection of Cure songs called “Wild Mood Swings” should really be — a hodgepodge of B-sides and alternate takes meant for the real heads, who could rep for “Strange Attraction” and the monolithic angst of “Want,” and the Bowie fanfic of “Club America” as loose gems, rather than flickers of inspiration snuffed out by a half hour of autopilot Cure. Nothing will convince me that Wild Mood Swings is secretly one of the Cure’s better albums, but I’ll settle for “The Top, only 50 percent less weird and 20 minutes longer.”
11. Three Imaginary Boys (1979)
“Boys Don’t Cry,” “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” “Killing An Arab” — all incredible songs and the working definition of “early Cure” for most casual fans. Well, maybe the American ones. As far as this list is concerned, these songs don’t exist. None appear on Three Imaginary Boys, the Cure’s proper debut, released in the UK in 1979. But in their place, you do get a profoundly inessential cover of “Foxy Lady” and deeper-than-deep cuts like “Meat Hook” that provide a more accurate view of what The Cure were in the late ’70s: a spiky, funky post-punk band along the lines of Wire and Gang Of Four, albeit one that actually expressed interest in romance. For the Cure-curious, it’s easily the most shocking album on the list, as everything else that comes after at least has some preview of a band that closed the 1980s as one of the most popular and influential in the world. But even if Three Imaginary Boys feels like an artistic cul-de-sac, it proves that the Cure needed to reinvent themselves a year later because they’d already arrived fully formed.
10. Seventeen Seconds (1980)
To the degree you can sorta feel for a bassist who’s played in at least three very successful bands, you gotta feel for Michael Dempsey. He’s responsible for the lead vocals on the “Foxy Lady” cover and that was the last time Robert Smith let anyone other than himself do that on a Cure song. And while he’s had a pretty good run as a member of The Associates and Roxy Music, he’s probably best known as the collateral damage necessary for The Cure to eventually become a cultural phenomenon. Explaining his ouster prior to Seventeen Seconds, Smith quipped, “[Dempsey] wanted us to be XTC part 2 and — if anything — I wanted us to be [Siouxsie And] The Banshees part 2.”
If anything, Seventeen Seconds might be something closer to Closer — similar to Joy Division’s second and final album, the Cure traded punchy hooks for empty space, conjuring a sense of creeping, inevitable dread rather than missed connections. Though home to a few remarkable singles (“A Forest,” “Play For Today”), Seventeen Seconds is more defined by everything that distinguishes it from Three Imaginary Boys: the unfinished interludes, the eerie instrumentals, the most quiet synthesizer leads ever recorded. Though it lacks the coherence of its visionary successor, Seventeen Seconds still shines as The Cure’s most risky of their many reinventions.
9. Pornography (1982)
Pornography is the cause celebre of the Cure’s fanatical wing, as much for the record itself as what it represents: “dark mode” Cure as an existential reality, rather than an aesthetic choice, the product of a time when Robert Smith wished he was dead, but not as much as he wished the same for his bandmates. If you’re considering Pornography for your top five, it’s almost certainly going to be No. 1. But, while I can only speculate the impact of hearing Pornography in the year that gave us Thriller, Rio, and Toto IV, its reputation as a historically alienating piece of antagonistic art is vastly overstated — “IT DOESN’T MATTER IF WE ALL DIE” is just as fun to sing as anything from “Just Like Heaven,” while “The Hanging Garden” and “The Figurehead” made Smith’s drug-induced paranoia sound like a welcome rather than a warning; though a scathing two-star Rolling Stone review backhandedly praised the Cure as “supremely gifted noisemakers,” it’s the atmospheric deep cuts that fail them here, proof that Robert Smith couldn’t not be a pop star even if he tried. And did they ever try on Pornography.
8. The Top (1984)
I’m sure my 16-year-old self would’ve traded anything to have the near entirety of recorded music available for immediate streaming, for about half the price he paid for Sponge’s Wax Ecstatic. At the same time, I envy how he had to treat his “Boss phase” or “Led Zeppelin phase” or a “Cure phase” like a scavenger hunt, cobbling together a discography in non-sequential order from Columbia House, $9.99 sale racks, or used CD stores. I believe this process enamored me to the small, weird outliers that I was legitimately surprised to see at the local Disc-Go-Round — Around The World In A Day, Tunnel Of Love (this was prior to its contemporary reappraisal), Presence, The Soft Parade… and The Top is very much a small, weird record. Even if The Cure were presumably a very unpleasant band to be around in those days, I’d love to bear witness to the studio sessions where Smith insisted that the supremely bugged out likes of “Bananafishbones” and “Piggy In The Mirror” made the cut.
Though time tends to be kind to most Cure albums, even in retrospect, The Top has been described as “a transitional record of forgettable songs,” “an album obviously recorded under stress, drink, and drugs,” and “the nadir of their catalog.” The more generous assessments land on “a batsh*t, bugf*ck freakout,” certainly warranted since the proto-metal of “Shake Dog Shake” and “Give Me It” are even more frightening than anything on Pornography. And yet, “The Caterpillar” and “Dressing Up” proved every bit as alluring and sensual as the synth-pop experiments of Japanese Whispers. No album from the Cure’s imperial phase is subject to lower expectations than The Top, and none gives a better return on investment — especially if it cost you just $5 at the local Disc-Go-Round.
7. Bloodflowers (2000)
All lists like these are subjective and some choices are more subjective than others. For example, my “Cure phase” lasted from about 1997 to 1998, which makes Bloodflowers the first new album I could experience without any received wisdom or preconceptions about its place in the canon. And I loved the thing, as its cushy production, dour mood, and sluggish tempos fit the lifestyle I was experiencing at the time: being a drunk, sad college student. In retrospect, it’s the beginning of The Cure as fan service, with Robert Smith puffing up its hype by describing Bloodflowers as the completion of a trilogy with Pornography and Disintegration. What this really meant is “all the songs are very long,” including “Watching Me Fall,” still the longest Cure song ever at 11-plus minutes. Yet even without the Keystone Ice-tinted glasses of youth, Bloodflowers has its moments — “Maybe Someday” is the rare dark Cure single of the 21st century and a successful one at that, while the bonkers keyboard riff of “39” is their most inspired sonic wrinkle in that same time. Based on the rest of their 2000s output, I was inclined to think that “39” would be the last time Smith truly wrote from the heart, but the rapturous reception of the similarly structured Songs Of A Lost World only goes to show what they left on the table.
6. Songs Of A Lost World (2024)
I’ll just admit it — as of October 31, I wasn’t buying the hype. The new songs held their own against the classics during the Cure’s massive 2023 amphitheater run, but they’d been playing them for years by that point and felt overly reliant on the band’s favorite cheat codes: drawn-out intros, stately tempos, and gleaming synth washes, all while shuffling the deck of their favorite Robert Smith-isms about birds, skies, tears, rain, and “you/I/she said.” When “Alone” announced that Songs Of A Lost World was indeed real and actually coming very soon, it had the shape and feel of a late-career peak… yet, in place of the garish overproduction of The Cure and 4:13 Dream, the instruments on “Alone” sounded oddly plastic and disconnected from each other; it wasn’t a throwback to 1989 so much as 2021, a time when rock bands were regularly recording their albums remotely. I was starting to get the sense that critics were reviewing the album they wanted, not the one they actually got. “If you’re arguing that it’s the Cure’s best since Disintegration, you need to show your work,” Tom Breihan argued in what is still the most even-handed review I’ve seen to this point, and even as someone who loved Bloodflowers, I got the sense that most critics just lacked the vocabulary to reckon with the first better-than-good new Cure album they’ve encountered in their adult lives.
By the end of November 1, I listened to Songs Of A Lost World three consecutive times and couldn’t wait to do the same the next day. I have trouble listening to much else at the moment. I’m uncomfortable suggesting that Robert Smith facing the loss of his father, mother, and older brother makes Songs Of A Lost World feel more emotionally invested and urgent than the similarly hued Bloodflowers, or projecting an unintended political resonance of it dropping four days before an election that has cast a Pornography-like pall over everyone reading this. As much as the Cure have recaptured the sound of their 1980s work, they’ve reanimated the spirit, a desire to give each album a distinct mood that blots out all others in the world. This isn’t something to easily be folded into your day in six-to-eight minute increments; it’s a refuge from the world at large, not a reflection of it, an album that doesn’t teach us to understand death and loss, but to feel it even when the real thing is remote. Perhaps this is all recency bias and Songs Of A Lost World will soon settle into “somewhere in the top half of Cure albums.” Then again, I figured that I’d grow out of the Cure albums that soundtracked my teens and here we are.
5. Faith (1981)
There is none more gray — the cover art, the muted production, a song literally called “All Cats Are Grey.” Indeed, Faith is the literal midpoint between the icy whites of Seventeen Seconds and Pornography‘s pitch black, putting it in a curious spot in a catalog often celebrated for its extremes. But I suppose “their most subtle album” is an extreme of its own and an especially suitable one for an album defined by Robert Smith’s struggles with spiritual ambivalence (and also the only one where critics roundly praised the lyrics). The connoisseur’s choice, an album that doesn’t astound like their bigger and bleaker ones, but still has mysteries to reveal over 40 years later.
4. The Head On The Door (1985)
Perhaps ironically, the Cure’s “pop” albums are the ones that are messy and indulgent, whereas the “brooding” ones are lauded as “focused.” The Head On The Door is the exception that proves this rule, the only conceivable bridge between the preceding years’ drinking, drugging, and dour entropy and the stadium status that awaits. Not that it lacked an element of odd curiosities — see the flamenco and Japanese flourishes of “The Blood” and “Kyoto Song,” the lopsided rhythm of “Six Different Ways,” the onomatopoeic solo of “The Baby Scrams.” But otherwise, there’s “Close To Me,” “A Night Like This,” “Push,” and “In Between Days,” songs composed with such efficiency and intention, it’s impossible to believe that Robert Smith was only one year removed from the psychosis that birthed The Top. There are Cure albums that are more acclaimed, more beloved and even more popular, yet this is the only one that could be confused for a singles collection.
3. Wish (1992)
Whenever rave reviews of Songs Of A Lost World want to show they mean business, they’ll typically include something along the lines of, “their best album since Wish.” We’re talking about one of the most influential and beloved active bands of the past half century putting out their best work in over 30 years. This is not like Rolling Stone repeating the same “their best since Achtung Baby/Automatic For The People” trope every time U2 or R.E.M. made a new record after 1991. And yet, read it more closely, and it’s not as raving of a rave as it initially appears: their best album since Wish doesn’t translate into it being necessarily better than Wish. Setting the bar at Bloodflowers just doesn’t have the same impact, does it?
Point being that Wish has served as the consensus pick for the Cure’s last truly great album, albeit one that rarely is placed on the same echelon as their ’80s work. Frankly, I can’t understand why — yes, Robert Smith has tried to distance himself from “Friday I’m In Love,” and it’s gained the reputation as a Cure song for people who don’t really like The Cure, but I find that it’s aged extremely well, especially as every attempt at a “pop” song since then has been a watered-down version of “Just Like Heaven.” Meanwhile, songs as distinct as the dreamlike “High” and the roiling “From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea” suggest the Cure were both a precursor and participant within Madchester, and though Wish is often cast as a more frivolous follow-up to Disintegration, “Open” and “A Letter To Elise” are every bit as grandiose as anything on its more esteemed predecessor.
2. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)
There’s a good argument to be made that Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is the Cure’s best album and an irrefutable argument that it’s the best place to start. With 18 songs and nearly as many identities, Kiss Me provides a treasure map for the novice — those taken by the raging excess of “The Kiss” and “Torture” should head directly to Pornography, “Just Like Heaven” and “Why Can’t I Be You?” solidifies their reputation as a definitive ’80s pop band for shut-ins, “Hot Hot Hot!!!” and “The Perfect Girl” hint at the more playful, dance-inflected pop they’d make in the ’90s, whereas the exotic interludes of “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep” and “The Snakepit.” Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me belongs in the rarefied echelon of London Calling; Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness; Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming; The White Album; Life After Death; Songs In The Key Of Life — legacy artists making double-LPs at the peak of their powers that are somehow so sprawling and consistently excellent that even the B-sides could’ve been a classic in their own right.
1. Disintegration (1989)
To the surprise of no one, I share the following opinion of my Indiecast cohost Steven Hyden: The Cure was meant to be listened to on CD. There’s a musicological argument, that their commercial peak overlaps almost exactly with that of the compact disc, and that those shiny silver discs are best suited for their the proudly uncanny warmth that suffuses their most beloved work — this is a band that could easily afford real horns and strings but always seemed to prefer the synth versions. Of course, I’m probably just biased because for years, I stared at those garish covers through a cracked jewel cover and fast-forwarded through the skips on “Wendy Time” that afflicted my scratched copy of Wish.
Now, I imagine that there will be an endlessly renewable resource of teenagers who will hear Disintegration for the first time on the sh*ttiest earbuds while absentmindedly scrolling through TikTok and have their minds completely blown all the same. I will also argue that they should spend the $50 or so it would cost to buy a used copy of Disintegration and a Discman for a superior sonic experience. If not, I’ll do them a favor and reprint a part of the liner notes and consider it essential work because it will never, ever appear on any streaming service: “THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO PLAY LOUD SO TURN IT UP.” I don’t recall seeing that in any other Cure album insert.
Following Robert Smith’s advice does help bring out the synth overdubs and tangled guitar harmonies that get muddied at lower volumes. That’s not really what he was getting at. Disintegration is not meant for casual listening. It is not an album that grows on you. Nor is it merely a Wall Of Sound. It sucks you in, draws a thick border around itself, and leaves you incapable of considering anything outside of it.
If this all sounds like rockist rationale, to elevate The Album over the singles that made The Cure multi-generational icons, that is also by design. As he approached his 30th birthday, Robert Smith had become a pop star and pop-goth lookbook and had also recently gotten married…and yet, he found himself aimless, depressed, and in constant conflict with his bandmates, wondering what he really had to show for it all. Equally inspired by LSD and his premature midlife crisis, Smith aspired to create the irrefutable masterpiece that was missing from his catalog, the kind that he believed most artists at his level had already achieved by 25.
But is Disintegration the monolithic opus that Smith thought he was making? Yes, it’s 72 minutes long and sonically unified in a way that previous high watermarks Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and The Head On The Door conscientiously avoid. And yet, Disintegration doesn’t rank this high because it’s the most coherent or the darkest or serious or even the longest The Cure album. It doesn’t even come down to “it has the best songs” or “it has their best production,” though that’s a part of it. Rather, it’s how all of it sounds romantic in the truest sense of the word, regardless of how much emotional territory it covers. The diversity in mood is actually the most underrated aspect of Disintegration — there’s the earnest devotion of “Lovesong” and the thrill of the new on “Fascination Street,” the playful acid trip of “Lullaby” and the abject despair of the title track, “Prayers For Rain” and the slow-motion sunrise of “Plainsong,” all of it suffused with such a deep longing and beauty and belief that you have no choice to turn all the way the f*ck up and submit.
