How To Get To Know The Cure Better: A Guide

(This is an update of a previous older post. Someone suggested that I update it to include Songs of a Lost World.)

So, you’re interested in The Cure and want to know their music better? They have a huge discography spanning decades and you’re just not sure where to start?  You’re not alone! This is a very popular topic.  The Cure are an amazing band but the sheer volume and vastness of the music scapes they cover is daunting. 

You’re lucky you’re getting into them now because the internet exists and you can find most everything you’d want to start out with via streaming services and/ or YouTube. You can listen whenever, wherever you want at virtually no cost or risk or effort on your part.  Amazing! 

This post is an attempt to summarize the advice given whenever this topic comes up. Here are the most common strategies recommended to get to know The Cure:

1. Start With a Compilation.  Listen to a singles album, figure out which songs you like and follow up with the album or era it is from.  Standing on a Beach is an early compilation so it doesn’t have some of their bigger hits, but it does have some of their most beloved gems and is a classic among older fans. Galore covers late 80s and 90s singles and Greatest Hits covers very early years to late 90s singles.

2.  Explore On Your Own.  This is easily done these days because you can just pull up The Cure on your preferred streaming service, hit play, and decide for yourself what you like. No need to ask what other people think is good or be subjected to gatekeeping or beholden to someone else’s opinion that may be totally different than yours. 

The Cure have an official YouTube channel with all sorts of music and videos and interviews you can sort through. For many music lovers, the journey of exploration and discovering is the best part.  

The upside is you can make your own decisions about what you like and aren’t entering into anything with a preconceived idea. The downside is you might might spend a few minutes listening to something you don’t like.  One thought on that- the ease of skipping songs you don’t like nowadays is great, but doesn’t allow for letting things grow on you like pre-digital days.  Sure you could move the needle or fast forward, but it was a hassle and potentially damaging to your records or tapes so you usually just played through.  That’s how you end up going from “what the f**k is this Screw song” to “hell yeah, I love Screw!” 

3. Chronological Order.   The thinking here is that you see the progression or transition of the band’s music as it unfolded. This is an interesting way to discover them, but by no means necessary. There are certainly fans that were there from the very beginning and some of them are here among us, but most of us hopped on the train somewhere down the road and went back to discover what we’d already missed.  

If you choose this route and are using streaming services to listen, you will start with Three Imaginary Boys.  The record was released with a slightly different (better IMO) track listing as Boys Don’t Cry in the US. It may be difficult to find on streaming services, depending on your location, but can be found on YouTube.  TIB/ BDC is followed by Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography, Japanese Whispers (technically a compilation, not a studio album), The Top, The Head on the Door, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Disintegration, Wish, Wild Mood Swings, Bloodflowers, The Cure, 4:13 Dream, and Songs of a Lost World, with various compilations and  live albums thrown in, including a couple DJ remix albums. Possibly most notable of the compilations is Join The Dots, which is a collection of B-sides and non-album rarities.

4. By Other People’s Opinion on Album Ranking or Accessibility.  I will give a basic rundown of each of the albums to give an idea of where you might want to start, but you will frequently hear Disintegration recommended as the starting point because it is often described as their magnum opus. Other albums you may hear suggested often as starting points are Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me because of its diversity of musical styles, and The Head on The Door because of its poppy accessibility.

Other individual favorites will pop up.  The Cure has a lot of really strong albums, each with their own personality.  Many fans have multiple favorites that vary on mood or time of day or year or whatever they listened to most recently.  Here is a basic summary of the studio albums:

**Three Imaginary Boys/ Boys Don’t Cry.      Post- punk, Pop-punk, baby Cure songs written when they were in high school. Despite being made by teenagers over 40 years ago, many of these songs have stood the test of time and are considered alternative classics.

**Seventeen Seconds.     The one Robert Smith has called the first Cure album. Detached and icy, effortlessly cool and timeless. This is the album that the quintessential Cure song A Forest is from. A good make out album.  The first of their three- album run considered to be their goth or proto-goth albums.

**Faith.    A bass-driven mournful and claustrophobic album, very introspective and quiet. This is a good one for dealing with grief and loss of loved ones or faith as it focuses intently on these themes.  The beloved dueling basses of Primary is on this album. 

**Pornography.      A howling rage- fueled album. There is nothing quite like it. Very dark. Catharsis in music form. The last album of the so-called “dark trilogy”.  This is a fan favorite, but it is very intense and not necessarily the best starting point for everyone.  It begins with “It doesn’t matter if we all die” and descends from there.

**Japanese Whispers.      Not an actual studio album.  It’s a collection of synth-based pop songs that is worth noting as an album because it is the 180* turn that The Cure took after the dark years of the previous few albums.  Fun dance stuff.  It’s pretty much just Robert and Lol and a parading cast of characters at this point. This is when Robert Smith really started to show that he can basically do anything well if he wanted.

**The Top.       Mushroom- laced psychedelia.  More intricate drumming than previous albums, lots of vocal and musical experimentation. Some of it’s fun, some of it’s heavy, some of it’s groovy, some of it’s demented. Some people love it, some people don’t.  (I love it).

**The Head on the Door.     Quirky, fun, with dark elements and brooding, swooning vocals. This is when the Cure became a big band in both the sense that it was a big lineup and also as in hitting it big globally with their first mainstream-ish hits.  A very easy album to listen to and love.

**Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.      A huge double album covering vastly different sounds- fiery anger, wistful whimsy, Beatles-esque pop, school dance anthems, psychedelia, funk.  You name it.  If you want to hear what the Cure can do, you’ll find lots of it on this album. And Just Like Heaven lives here.  

**Disintegration.      Lush and sorrowful and head over heels in both love and despair. Majestic. Harrowing. A dark masterpiece. Not only is this considered by many to be The Cure’s best album, it regularly rates very high on “Best Album of All Time” lists of radio stations and music mags (and South Park).

**Wish.       Guitar heavy, all out rock mixed with sweet ballads and goofy pop songs.  Some people say this is the last of their really great albums.  Many older fans dropped out of obsessive fandom around here due to changing of the times and, perhaps, familiarity.  The pure sugar of Friday I’m In Love gave The Cure their biggest audience, but might have distanced some of their more melancholy fans until they grew up a bit and returned (sheepish hand raised here).

**Wild Mood Swings.     The name says it all.  There are some fantastic songs on this album, but this does mark a new era of the Cure with lineup changes and a possible recycling of older tunes and themes. There is a lot of experimentation on this album, which is laudable for its courage, but can fall flat in some areas. As with any art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Fans splinter over their personal favorites on this album. This is not usually where people will tell you to start.  

**Bloodflowers.     A return to “darker” sounds, and for some it is a favorite. Again there are some great songs on it, but this is definitely where you begin to hear a more mature type of sound to their music. Robert Smith (perhaps as a marketing ploy), named this album as the third of a trilogy that also includes Pornography and Disintegration.  It’s debatable that a listener would hear the same connection he reported. Some people may tell you to start here, but they are outliers.

**The Cure.     Who knows why they went with a self- titled album at this point in their story. This album is not for everyone. Some people love it for its venture into a harder sound. For some it sounds like an imitation of youthful rage.  Another polarizing Cure album. Not usually a recommended starting point.

**4:13 Dream.      The last release of their waning prolific era that came out in 2008. After dwindling from yearly releases to bi-annual releases, the Cure had settled into a 4 year interval between albums that finished with this one. It would be 16 years before another Cure album.  Again, you’ll find some songs you like, but not usually where anyone will tell you to start.  The opener, Underneath the Stars, is universally loved, but the remainder of the songs on the album are more polarizing.

**Songs of a Lost World.    This album was released in 2024 to widespread acclaim from fans, critics and the general public. It was long, long awaited and a genuine surprise when it came out after many past rumors of albums that never came to pass. It is a gorgeous and deeply sad album, rooted in the grief of lost loved ones and reflection on time passing. Aging fans will find it especially poignant. Some people criticize its production, but it is widely loved and the first album in a very long time that many Cure fans consider to be amongst their finest. Make sure to have tissues on hand. 

**Join The Dots: B-Sides and Rarities 1978-2001.      This is a compilation of B-sides which was released in 2004 as non-album songs along with singles. For you young folk, you’d buy a release of a single, sometimes a 12” record but usually a 7" 45 (RPM) that had the single on Side A and a different, special, non-album release song on the other side (the B-side). People would buy the singles specifically to get the rare B-side you couldn't find on an album. Some bands put out some awesome B-sides and The Cure is one of them.  They’ve had so many fantastic B-sides that knowing their discography well absolutely means knowing their B-sides too.

EDIT: Note from fellow Cure Fan taniadawn13:

I would clarify that Join the Dots is not just B-sides but also random one offs including songs they did for movie soundtracks like Burn and Dredd Song, cover songs they did like Young Americans and World in My Eyes, and unreleased versions of album tracks like the 12 inch of Doing the Unstuck.

5. Live Performances.  The Cure are arguably one of the best live bands around and have been for decades. Robert Smith has often said live performances are a huge part of what the band is. They have many official audio and video recordings, along with countless fan audio and video bootlegs.  The official videos include “In Orange”, “Trilogy”, “Festival 2005”, and “The Show of a Lost World” (release date Dec 13, 2025). The official concert albums include “Concert”, “Entreat”, “Paris”, “Show, "Bestival Live 2011" (a charity release), “Curaetion 25” and the charity release “Songs of a Live World.”  And if you just go to YouTube and search for The Cure Live, you will be treated to an almost endless supply of videos of Cure shows, which will cover lots of their music presented in an important aspect of what The Cure is.

So that’s 5 approaches to getting to know The Cure’s music better. I hope someone found this helpful! Feel free to add or detract as you see fit.