(I’m glad the guitars on last year’s Wish reissue are way louder now.)Ī new album, rumored to be called Songs of a Lost World, has long been promised, and I don’t discount the idea that it could be great. (No one else could guest with Blink-182, Crystal Castles, and Gorillaz and make it all make sense.) The reissues are top-notch and loaded with revealing bonuses. (The 2004 traveling festival Curiosa featured Mogwai, Interpol, the Rapture, and Thursday.) His features are smart and surprising. (The band famously kept playing more hits even after its 2009 headlining Coachella set was cut off.) He wisely cultivates relationships with his greatest acolytes. ( The man tried his best to sell you a $20 ticket in 2023.) He never skimps on the songs he knows people want to hear. Smith always has been canny about how he manages his legacy. There are now die-hard fans who are much younger than 1992’s Wish, the band’s last truly great album. The Cure has ever been part of the Morose Teenager Starter Kit, alongside Harold and Maude and Blankets, and its influence will endure as long as kids are bummed. (Not aging into an anti-immigration weirdo is a real knockout blow.) He also long ago defeated his rival Morrissey. He was the main plot point of a Mike Leigh film and the inspiration for a Sean Penn film I haven’t seen on account of it looking terrible. He inspired Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, James O’Barr’s The Crow, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands-and also Tim Burton’s whole vibe. He was one of the first celebrity guests on South Park. It conquered the hearts of America’s arty weirdos with the essential 1986 Standing on a Beach compilation and conquered everyone else with 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and 1989’s Disintegration.Īlong the way, Smith became a cultural icon, and his look (poorly applied lipstick, hair that makes it look like he stuck his finger in an electrical socket, deeply skeptical eyes) became entrenched as both a uniform and a shorthand. Your Favorite Songs Are Finding New Life, Just at Warp Speed Frank Ocean Is Human-and So Was His Disastrous Coachella Setįrom there, the Cure set out to prove that it could do whatever it felt like: absolute pop bangers, wedding dance staples, guitar epics, or That Real Goth Shit. But something quite unexpected happened, as the Cure followed that run of albums up with the absolutely frothy pop single trilogy (lotta trilogies with this band) of “Let’s Go to Bed,” “The Walk,” and “The Lovecats.” These songs proved that Smith was willing to push back against his image and that he wouldn’t let anyone define the Cure except himself. If the band had quit then, it would have been an underground legend. He also decided that the name Easy Cure was a bit too hippieish for his tastes.Īfter helping to set the template for New Wave and post-punk (spiky guitars, moaning bass, lots of free-floating anxiety) on its 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys, the Cure went on to record the trilogy of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography between 19, firmly establishing, alongside its peers in Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the sound, look, and subculture of goth. (Thompson would leave and rejoin more than once, and he’s not the only member to have taken such a route.) Eventually, a few singers left, and Smith decided he could do as good a job as anyone in the frontman department. With Smith as the guitarist, that band eventually morphed into the Easy Cure by 1977 and included Mick Dempsey, Laurence “Lol” Tolhurst, and Pearl Thompson, all of whom would fall out with Smith at one point or another. Robert Smith, a precious lad who once wore a dress to his Crawley, West Sussex, school, formed Malice with a few mates in 1976, the Year Punk Broke, and began gigging around town. they’ve all become fundamental parts of the universe, an entire color. There’s just no point in debating the Cure versus Fleetwood Mac or A Tribe Called Quest or R.E.M. I am merely saying there is a rarefied place where the Beatles hover that few groups get to, where their achievements are so singular and monumental, and their influence is so vast, that they can’t be measured against anyone in any real way. (Though, pointedly, I am not not saying that.) I’m not saying the Cure is the second-best band to ever exist. The only band that can be said to be better than the Cure is the Beatles.
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