The Cure: The Final Sound

A curated mixtape of the iconic goth band's experimental side

It appears a new The Cure album will be released on November 1, titled Songs of a Lost World.

In the late 1980s, I solemnly spun the band’s records in my candle-lit teenager room. Their music soundtracked my adolescence.

In high school, I even played in a short-lived The Cure cover band.

Back then I wore a lot of black and Doc Marten’s boots. I backcombed my long, black-dyed hair. My small town clique included a couple of true goths, but I never fully committed to that subculture; there were just too many other interesting sounds I fell for as the 1990s moved along.

30 years after first hearing “Just Like Heaven”, I got the opportunity to see The Cure live. I was afraid it might turn into a terrible experience. It ended up being quite decent for an arena show, rekindling my love for their music after 15 years of not really listening to them at all.

Still, I can’t say I’m too excited about the prospect of a new album.

Everything they’ve released after 1992’s Wish was problematic to me. 1996’s Wild Mood Swings was straight-up god-awful, and 2000’s Bloodflowers was musically fine, but too overly concerned with restoring their own legacy. Their last two albums, 2004’s The Cure and 2008’s 4:13 Dream, were perfectly fine in terms of songwriting and production; they just didn’t do much for me.

Sure, I will give Songs of a Lost World a proper spin once it’s out in November, but I doubt it will agitate me as much as, say, Disintegration when it came out.

I realize that says as much about The Cure as it does about myself.

Still the news sent me on a nostalgic trip, so I did what music nerds do: I put together a list.

Below you will find a hand-curated playlist of The Cure songs – not their greatest hits, just a CD length mixtape of weird album cuts, b-sides, live recordings and instrumentals from the first decade of the band’s existence, showcasing their experimental side and their roots in post-punk.

My inspiration was this piece in The Quietus where their editors picked some of their favourite songs, “Beyond the Hits”.

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1 – The Final Sound (1980)

Writing their third album Seventeen Seconds, Robert Smith was deeply inspired, among other things, by David Bowie’s Low. Released in 1977, that record’s B-side contained some rather experimental ambient pieces produced by Brian Eno.

“The Final Sound” sounds like Smith’s way of channeling these abstract Bowie/Eno tracks by playing some dissonant notes on a keyboard that sounds almost like a harpsichord, with simmering bass and noise underneath.

The instrumental intro is just shortly under a minute long. The piece was originally much longer, but the tape ran out while recording; due to budget restraints, the band wasn’t able to re-record it.

2 – Splintered In Her Head (1981)

First released as the B-side to “Charlotte Sometimes”, a non-album single that came out in the aftermath of 1981’s Faith, the middle record of The Cure’s famed ‘goth trilogy’.

Often performed live during the Faith and Pornography tours, this captures the band at their most tribal and psychedelic. With its shamanic drumming and distorted vocals, the tune feels reminiscent of The Cure’s own “The Hanging Garden” (which would appear on 1982’s Pornography) and, as a YouTube commenter rightfully points out, Joy Division’s “Atrocity Exhibition” from the Closer album, which had been released the prior year.

3 – Pornography (1982)

The ‘goth trilogy’ – three extra-bleak albums released between 1980 and 1982 in a frenzy of early success, drug addiction and relentless touring – was of particular importance to me when I was younger.

Pornography is the culmination of that run of albums, and its final track is the culmination of that claustrophobic record – all garbling, backwards playing voices over tribal drums and cavernous bass.

The band imploded after Pornography, and the duo of Smith/Tolhurst emerged on the other side with a sweet and playful, more commercial sound on Japanese Whispers.

4 – The Drowning Man (1981)

This is from Pornography’s predecessor Faith, an uncanny greyscale record that might be my favourite The Cure album of all time.