Pitchfork's 200 Best Albums of the 1980s

Pitchfork have revised and updated their 200 Best Albums of the 1980s list, and here's how The Cure fared:

#109 - The Head on the Door

The Cure’s sixth LP was also their big American breakthrough—a bright, crisp record nearly devoid of their signature swirling gloom. In this new light, Robert Smith’s dark desires took on positively cheery undertones, from jangly opener “In Between Days” and the eternal synth bop of “Close to Me” to the almost-disco of “Push,” which is basically Blondie viewed through a veil of distortion. It was the only one of the band’s albums to be entirely conceived by Smith, but far from being a hermetic affair, it veered outward, eagerly grabbing at new ideas. And with an added fifth member, multi-instrumentalist Porl Thompson, the sound was tighter and bolder, too. The brief, wondrous record marks a transition point in the Cure’s canon, a snapshot of a band making their way toward sprawling works yet to come. –Eve Barlow


#9 - Disintegration

The stylistic changes, the shifting lineups, the psilocybin and emptied liquor cabinets: Few acts had a more helter-skelter ’80s than the Cure. To trace a path from 1980’s Boys Don’t Cry up to 1987’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is to traverse punky perkiness, black-hearted resignation, foulest bile, insouciant psychedelia, and eyelash-batting pop. But it all comes to a head with 1989’s Disintegration—a sprawling double album that boils down all the Cure’s complexities into two contrasting shades of bittersweet.

Robert Smith’s love songs have never been as direct as “Lovesong,” a synth ballad as plain-spoken as a note left on a pillow, nor as evocative as “Plainsong,” a character study written with Raymond Carver’s sense of focus. If the album’s first half epitomizes the band’s unique fusion of melancholy and whimsy, the second half delves into their soul-scouring depths with surging guitars, storm-tossed rhythms, and Smith’s most desperate wails. “Fascination Street” and “Prayers for Rain” draw from the dirge-like moods of their early-’80s work while blowing that feeling up to acid-drenched proportions; like everything on the album, these two songs are intractable, improbable beasts, the kinds of echo-soaked anthems that made the Cure the decade’s unlikeliest alt-rock heroes. –Philip Sherburne