“My eyes are bursting hearts”: The 10 saddest songs released by The Cure
From the bleak shadows of a mind troubled with every emotion a person could ever feel emerged The Cure: a band whose reflective surfaces weren’t just diary entries but musings about the world as most of us see and experience it. This is also where ambiguity exists, not only as background noise but as textured layerings to what we claim to know and understand, but that will shape us for the rest of time.
We can’t ever really know what Robert Smith pours into his songs, except for the small recollections of what made him pen such timeless soundscapes in the first place. Even then, the songs become canvases for endless exploration through different facets of the human experience. While there are undeniable elements of joy, relief, and resilience in there, the one that threads through most compositions is the one emotion most of us cling to, even when it doesn’t serve us anymore: heartache.
Sadness often defines the parameters of everything Smith seeks to experience, from human connection to the haunt of memory, and outlines the premise of most of his stories, braiding itself with the hues of different emotions that emerge from its darkened core. Almost like a parallel version of Marcel Proust’s madeleine cakes, sadness and memory in Smith’s world revolve around how other concepts define them; both present to varying degrees of contemplation depending on how they emerge in that specific moment.
However, sadness isn’t always simple or a means to an end, at least not in The Cure’s world. Often, these songs pervade the space with caution, grasping at the idea without ever fully committing, dancing around the flames of being alive and feeling during a limited time on earth. In those moments, sadness isn’t seen as merely bad, but an indicator of a heart left open and vulnerable, even when it shows no signs of healing.
The saddest Cure songs of all time:
‘Apart’
Breakups might be one of the more prolific sources of inspiration in the rock scene. Still, when it’s done diligently and meticulously, it can seem more like a poetic reflection on the concept of loss in a broader sense rather than a trivial recollection of a relationship that has reached its end. For ‘Apart’, Smith incorporated all the usual Cure-esque tropes, from a cutting riff to heartfelt vocals, making loss feel like an intensely visceral experience that can’t be captured using simple vernacular.
“He waits for her to understand, but she won’t understand at all / She waits all night for him to call, but he won’t call anymore,” Smith sings over a heartbreaking explosion of arrangements, pulling you into his deeply fractured world with effortless ease. ‘Apart’ is a good go-to for those looking for a good wallow when nothing else makes sense.
‘Lullaby’
Based on a recurring nightmare Smith experienced when he was younger, ‘Lullaby’ doesn’t evoke sadness in the usual downbeat way that most of these songs do. Instead, it pulls apart the very meaning of darkness, searching all corners of the concept of sadness like an unrelenting force desperate to feel its entire wrath, even if in the end, all it does is destroy his consciousness.
Perhaps the song’s most impactful aspect isn’t its story but the way it plays on notions of the lullaby itself, intertwining fear and longing into something that’s supposed to be a safe space. In this world, melancholy is the only thing Smith knows to be real, giving sadness an overarching significance that makes everything else appear clearer, almost like it’s crucial to every human experience.
‘Bare’
Wid Mood Swings isn’t their best album by a long shot, but it does have some majorly overlooked nuggets of gold, like the immediately endearing ‘Jupiter Crash’ and the heartwrenching ‘Bare’. A song that lives up to its name in spades, ‘Bare’ is one of the more unsettling songs that somehow became glossed over due to the record’s band reputation, despite its honest beauty.
Throughout the track, Smith ruminates on the emotions of loss and how many of these experiences feel disjointed and unrefined in the haze of brokenness. “And all the tears you cry, they’re not tears for me. Regrets about your life, they’re not regrets for me,” Smith sings, reflecting on how longing can misconstrue what we feel we actually want, when most of the time it’s less about the person and more about other uncertainties.
‘M’
While it’s easy to apply any meaning or emotion to many songs by The Cure, ‘M’ feels particularly ambiguous, drawing lines between those lesser discussed aspects of a relationship and the malaise someone might feel when trying to decipher what they wanted in their past versus how that matches up to the person they are now.
Though not necessarily sad in a simplistic sense, ‘M’ taps into the strange headspace most of us feel when we’re unsure who we are or what we want, despite the seemingly graceful nature of the world around us. Intensifying this sense is the insistence of the accompanying arrangements that somehow borders on irritating, reflecting the broader theme of disillusionment.
‘A Forest’
It’s no secret why ‘A Forest’ became the song most see as the quintessential Cure song—its moody lyrics and broody atmosphere undeniably represent a broader sweep of expectations when it comes to their sound, and Smith’s ambiguity when it comes to deciphering its actual meaning only adds to its growing timelessness and mystique.
“It’s just about a forest,” he once said. In reality, the song is far more than just that, pervading through varying states of sadness and consciousness before arriving nowhere in particular. Throughout ‘A Forest’, it’s clear we’re not in charge of where we go. Rather, what’s more important is allowing and embracing the cold mist, entering those realms we usually lock away, and emerging on the other side with smudged eyeliner and poorly outlined lipstick.
‘There Is No If’
Undoubtedly one of the most melancholic songs Smith ever wrote, ‘There Is No If’ from 2000’s Bloodflowers barely even made it on the album, with the frontman himself admitting it almost felt too depressing to include. A minimalist piece featuring only Smith on vocals and instruments, ‘There Is No If’ isn’t what you might expect when turning on a song by The Cure, giving it a strange edge that’s difficult to claim as good or bad.
However, its quality isn’t the reason Smith wanted to dismiss it. He’d actually wanted to get rid of it because of its bleak outlook. “I think the only really depressing song on the album is ‘There Is No If,’ because in that one, there really is no way out – everything goes wrong and then you die,” he told Pulse.
Continuing: “I originally didn’t want that song on the album, and I was loath to even sing it, but the others in the band really wanted it on there. I normally disregard the four-to-one votes, which are as meaningless in this band as they are in any dictatorship, but everyone who heard the song really liked it.”
‘The Same Deep Water as You’
A song so intense most find it difficult to revisit, the nine minutes of ‘The Same Deep Water as You’ feel like they fly by, journeying through the storm of heartache like a sheer force of desperation. However, like most of The Cure’s saddest and most heartbreaking songs, there’s an undeniable element of catharsis throughout, the kind made for leaning into heartache for no good reason other than to feel all of its sharp edges.
The song also includes some of Smith’s best lyrics of all time. A somewhat overlooked Disintegration staple, the song holds some of the singer’s most tragic reflections, including: “‘The shallow drowned lose less than we’, you breathe / The strangest twist upon your lips / ‘And we shall be together'”. A thorough masterpiece, from start to finish.
‘Pictures of You’
Those delicate lines of sadness and memory thrive on ‘Pictures of You’, showcasing a wistful Smith whose revisits of old musings and times gone by leave him feeling a strangely tragic version of nostalgia and longing. ‘Pictures of You’ sounds and feels like those memories and people we can’t latch on to, no matter how hard we try. It also alludes to those weaker moments of contemplation when we feel we’re stuck on the things most have left behind.
These are, incidentally, some of the band’s greatest and most accomplished moments, when it’s uncertain which emotions are supposed to be winning out. All that’s clear is that everything almost always exists simultaneously, the good, the bad, and everything in between. And, sometimes, these emotions and feelings aren’t rooted in anything deeper than mere happenstance.
‘Homesick’
Another overlooked Disingegration gem, ‘Homesick’ is one of the band’s most beautiful compositions, led effortlessly by a delicate piano arrangement into a gorgeously heady bassline. It’s a deviation for The Cure, but one they pull off exponentially without compromising on all the usual melancholic tricks they became known and loved for.
Eventually, when Smith’s vocals arrive, low and dark, the song’s gritty edges intensify, bolstered by the overwhelming feeling of having to let go without any last source of respite. As Smith sings: “Just one more and I’ll walk away / All the everything you win turns to nothing today / And I forget how to move when my mouth is this dry / And my eyes are bursting hearts in a blood-stained sky.”
‘Faith’
“Catch me if I fall, I’m losing hold / I can’t just carry on this way, and every time I turn away / Lose another blind game,” Smith sings in the opening line of ‘Faith’, focussing on the powerful entity of nothingness when the entire world seems to be moving at a fast pace. Throughout the song, Smith’s heart remains frustrated and empty, like his soul is stagnant, while everybody else enjoys the never-ending party.
One of the main reasons why ‘Faith’ has become one of the most quintessentially “sad” The Cure songs is how evocative it is. Smith doesn’t dance around the concept like usual, evoking various ambiguities to create multiple interpretations. Instead, he tackles his anguish head-on, using sharp and sinister imagery to get the point across. ‘Faith’ isn’t for the faint-hearted.
