Treble 100: No. 2, The Cure – Disintegration

On most days, Pornography is my favorite album by The Cure, its loathing and seething anger palpable and scalding hot, its heaviness and abrasion driven to the farthest extremes it ever would reach throughout the band’s career. On brighter days when I’m feeling more optimistic and carefree, it’s The Head On the Door, an album that retains the group’s dark aesthetic and gothic bona fides but wraps them in a warm embrace of pop, best heard through the singles “In Between Days” and “Close to Me.” And in the depths of fall, when the sky fades to gray and every tree sheds it leaves, I retreat into the post-punk minimalism of Seventeen Seconds and its haunting mystique.

At best, these records are either tied with or fall just short of the majestic scope and labyrinthine sprawl of Disintegration. Released in 1989, the band’s eighth album is their unassailable masterpiece, a timeless and ageless compendium of gothic grandeur, its sound as sharp and revelatory as if it were released yesterday while bearing the sound of an immortal relic. It’s almost too colossal to be a personal favorite—it’s the pinnacle of post-punk and gothic music, not merely an accomplishment but an ideal.

For all its riches of expansive, hypnotic sounds, though, Disintegration was born of a deeply personal place when Robert Smith began writing it in 1988. By the surface level measure of success as we might define it from a safe distance, The Cure had achieved everything a rock band could have ever hoped for—a platinum-selling album in 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, a hit single with “Just Like Heaven,” massive tours, adoring fans and so on. Smith didn’t take to fame easily, however and sank deeper into depression the longer The Cure were seen as pop stars and as he increasingly became “public property,” as he once described it. Yet he was simultaneously hit with a feeling of inadequacy from not having released what he saw as a defining work before his 30th birthday, which loomed just over the horizon. It’s a lot of pressure for a young person to put on himself, compounded by what felt like very public walls closing in on him, sparking an early-mid-life crisis that might have ended the band altogether if it hadn’t miraculously resulted in this: a grand fortress he built as a means to find an escape.

The Cure’s growing ambition had already been established with Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, a 17-song, 74-minute album that seemed to capture just about every direction the group had taken in its various permutations over the past decade. It yielded several pop singles, certainly, but despite Smith’s remark that it was a “party album,” it’s a much more complex blend of ideas, comprising not just hook-laden radio singles but grand gothic dirges (“The Kiss”), experimental psychedelia (“Like Cockatoos,” “Icing Sugar”) and abrasive rock songs (“Shiver and Shake”). Disintegration is just as sprawling and immense, but its parts connect and form a unified whole in a way that Kiss Me doesn’t. It, too, features pop singles and standalone moments of glory, but it’s a work meant to be experienced as a singular journey unto itself.

In the depths of Smith’s disillusionment, he began recording demos while taking LSD as a means of coping with his psychological struggles and planning for what might have been his first solo album. Yet when he shared the results of his hibernation tapes with his bandmates, they heard a Cure album, and he concurred. But from the colossal synth chords of “Plainsong,” a mesmerizing opening statement that’s gothic in the manner of a cathedral, Disintegration feels as if it’s bigger than the band itself. 

From that moment, introduced with the delicate detail of twinkling windchimes and offering a glimpse into his uneasy state of mind (“‘And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead’/And then you smiled for a second”), the very thing that Smith felt hadn’t materialized in The Cure’s catalog—and in his young adulthood—begins to unfold. Disintegration fully realizes and makes flesh the very suggestion of what The Cure could be and in their most inspired moments often were, expanding their capabilities and finding greater cohesion in the process.

Despite Smith’s initial vision of the album as a solo endeavor, Disintegration is very much a full band effort. It’s often the performances of key players within the group that both define and elevate these songs: Roger O’Donnell’s velvet sheets of synth in “Plainsong,” Boris Williams’ opening rumble of drums in “Closedown,” Simon Gallup’s sinister bass grooves on “Fascination Street” and “Disintegration.” And yet, this isn’t an album of hooks, per se. They’re certainly there—despite his frustrations with celebrity, Smith knows how to write a resonant melody better than most—but they’re secondary to the vast, immersive quality of the album. The sound of Disintegration is all consuming—more like the ocean than the spider man—curiously comforting in its layered sonic treatments, and widescreen sensory experience. It sounds incredible whether heard on headphones or a home stereo (don’t do yourself the disservice of playing it on a shitty smartphone speaker), and a statement in the album’s liner notes suggests as much: “This music has been mixed to be played loud, so turn it up.”

Each song seems to only grow richer in sonic depth with each minute, and most of them are given substantial stretches to simply allow the listener to become part of that world. Compositionally, very little here resembles a pop song as we typically understand it; most songs don’t have a chorus, and while no moment or measure ever truly repeats itself, there’s often a constant that holds them together—a bassline, a chord progression, a solitary tether to the material world. Disintegration yielded four singles, but even those mostly evade conventional pop structure; “Pictures of You,” “Fascination Street” and “Lullaby” each carrying a refrain of sorts, but not a recognizable chorus.

The one exception is “Lovesong,” which is not coincidentally the shortest song here. It’s also, for all its aesthetic shades of gray, a rare moment of pure, unobstructed joy. Smith, newly married to Mary Poole, wrote what he saw as a challenge: an honest and sincere expression of love, made plain through direct yet nonetheless affecting lines such as “Whenever I’m alone with you/You make me feel like I am home again/Whenever I’m alone with you/You make me feel like I am whole again.” He described it as a “cheap and cheerful” gift to Poole, yet its intimate and unguarded statement of affection broke through to a mainstream audience, becoming the group’s only top 10 single in the U.S.

It’s to Smith and The Cure’s credit that a pop-friendly arrow to the heart such as “Lovesong” still feels at home next to the more cavernous menace of “Prayers for Rain” or the melancholy drift of “Homesick.” That, in part, goes back to the glorious sound of this record, which is reason enough to drop the needle and simply become part of its world for an hour and change, but it’s also because the sequence and overall craft of the album is something like being guided through different rooms within that spectacular fortress Smith crafted, one beautifully ornate piece of design inextricable from the whole of the architecture. 

Smith’s turn away from pop’s embrace seemed to have the unintended consequence of only expanding The Cure’s audience. Elektra Records initially balked at releasing the album, as revealed in Jeff Apter’s Never Enough, describing the album as both “wilfully obscure” and “commercial suicide.” This introverted, dark and expansive album, one whose songs mostly roam past the five-minute mark, some just shy of ten, somehow went double platinum, selling more than two million copies in the U.S. It likewise saw the group playing 10,000-and-up capacity stadiums on its subsequent tour.

Since Disintegration’s release, and indeed during the group’s rise in the ‘80s, a kind of conventional wisdom emerged that The Cure held a specific appeal toward a uniquely teenage kind of dramatic angst. Which is at least in part true, but also sells short the sophistication of what they ultimately created. While throughout Disintegration you hear oblique statements of fatalism and defeat (“We both of us knew how the end always is”,  “...but I really believed that this time was forever”), they’re spoken from the other side, from a man in the grips of malaise from a youth that he sees as slipping through his fingers. Whether statements of love or regret, staring at the abyss or being eaten alive, these are feelings anyone can relate to. Disintegration speaks to all of us.

Like everyone else, I first started listening to Disintegration as a teenager, but my appreciation for it only grew into adulthood. Its nuances revealed themselves over time and I reveled in the opportunity to explore its myriad subterranean corridors and find stillness within its ever-moving currents. I fell in love with a girl whose favorite band was The Cure (and still is) and I can’t imagine going for any extended period of time without returning to their music. I increasingly saw Disintegration less as a piece of art to be admired from afar as something that I’ve grown with and have carried with me along the way. 

I’ve seen The Cure a couple times since first hearing Disintegration, and have heard the band play most of its songs live, and even after decades of repeat spins, its majestic sound never loses its power—those feelings it instills, even when dormant, are always stirring just beneath the surface. And despite the feelings of panic that befell him before writing this masterpiece, Robert Smith seems to have transitioned into a proper adulthood just fine. After all, he’s the rare artist with the ability to actually make Ticketmaster flinch. 

I wrote a version of this essay back when I was 29, just as Robert Smith was when he wrote Disintegration, finding a deeper connection to it as I stood on the verge of a symbolic transition of my own. Turning 30 carried perhaps a bit less gravity for me than it did for Smith, and indeed I can’t lay claim to having made anything nearly as good as Disintegration, but the way he translated his disenchantment and uncertainty into something so powerful and beautiful spoke to me. I’m now in my early forties and I remain both in awe of and comforted by the album, even as middle age has caught up with me. It’s not enough to say that Disintegration is my favorite album by The Cure, but that it’s become a part of who I am. 

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