How The Cure reshaped goth rock on "Disintegration"

New Record Bin article at Nooga takes a look back at 'Disintegration'. Here's an excerpt:

"Disintegration" was released May 2, 1989, and would forever change the way people looked at and responded to The Cure. Once this record came out, for better or worse, people would gauge this aesthetic by its attention to or delineation from the sounds of this specific album. Whereas their previous few records were steeped in pop distraction, "Disintegration" was a return to the dark, dense sounds of their early '80s work. This was a new chapter in goth rock's storied lineage, and The Cure was determined that the genre would again have the emotional potential that it once had before it became something of a cultural stereotype.

These songs are bottomless, filled with cocooning rhythms and the band's trademark opulence. But there isn't a sense that they were trying to reclaim some of their former glory. They were taking the experiences and inspirations from those earlier records and reconditioning them into a subverting take on the goth rock mentality. And besides being a callback to the sounds of their prior releases, "Disintegration" is arguably the band's greatest accomplishment—it is the sound of a band remembering why they loved making music in the first place.

Read the rest at Nooga.