From NME:
“I can’t shake it,” comes the iconic pained shriek of The Cure’s Robert Smith on ‘Girls Float Boys Cry’ – the knowingly titled downer highlight of ††† (Crosses)’ second album, ‘Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete.’. Now a cameo from the Gothfather would usually be put front and centre by most bands, but here it’s more like a spooky Easter egg – a surprise splash of black paint on the canvas.
“I had this idea, ‘What if I gave Robert call and asked him to have this little hidden vocal on the song’,” frontman Chino Moreno tells NME. “His unmistakable voice just pops out of nowhere.”
It’s far from his first encounter with Smith. His other band Deftones famously performed a merciless cover of The Cure’s ‘If Only Tonight We Could Sleep’ for their MTV Icon celebration back in 2004, before Smith later invited them to play his curated Meltdown in London in 2018 and he remixed ‘Teenager’ for the ‘Black Stallion’ companion record to the 20th anniversary of their seminal album ‘White Pony’ in 2021. Still, Moreno says “it was a trip to hear a word or a phrase that you’ve written then hear someone who’s voice you love and who inspired you throughout your music-loving life”.
With teenage Moreno “really drawn into sad, depressing music” and Crosses bandmate (and former guitarist with post-hardcore legends Far) Shaun Lopez in love with The Cure’s “dark but not obvious songs”, it’s a bucketlist duet. With their horror-noir aesthetic, sense of bittersweet romance, and records adorned with crucifixes, there’s a pretty sizeable meeting in the venn diagram, but the duo also aren’t too wild about being labelled as ‘goth’.
