The 1992 album that made Robert Smith dismantle The Cure: “Done as much as we could”
Whenever Robert Smith makes a new record, he never really knows whether it’s any good until it’s actually out, when he can sense the response from the fans.
Although that’s fairly common in the world of music, for Smith, the unknown often frees him from any expectation, allowing him the space and time to focus on the sort of music he actually wants to make. However, it also means that if fans’ response is negative, he’s often left wondering where the hell it all went wrong.
This was the case for Wild Mood Swings. The response when that record came out was mixed, which, for a musician, is probably one of the worst things that can happen. When you’ve poured your heart and soul into something personal, the most you can hope for is an overwhelming positive from those who actually have the time to listen.
With Wild Mood Swings, however, the band’s fans weren’t really sure what Smith was trying to do, and found that much of the music felt like it lacked its usual charm and didn’t make much sense pacing-wise, either. And except for the odd overlooked gem, like ‘The 13th’ and ‘Jupiter Crash’, most of the material was pretty forgettable, too, especially against the genius of records like Pornography and Disintegration.
Even Wish felt like a major step up, which also seemed like a pretty successful run of everything the band tried to achieve afterwards with Wild Mood Swings, incorporating their usual dark, gothic elements with broader sweeps of pop-adjacent accessibility and melodies. However, the difference was that, with Wild Mood Swings, Smith felt overly confident that the material was good. With Wish, he wasn’t so sure.
Which turned out to be a positive middle-ground, because he could focus on doing what he wanted to do without having to think too much about what would happen once the record was out there. At the time, however, it felt like the record was a product of its own circumstances, with them actively choosing not to maintain the momentum after, in case things fell apart.
Which they did anyway. As Smith later recalled, Wish was a commercial success, but it was also a necessary reset that forced him to slow down, which, as we’ve seen, is the one thing Smith values the most when it comes to his own creative freedom.
“I think the group that did the Wish album, the core of that group, we’d really done as much as we could,” he told Paul Freeman in 1996.
“In some ways, in the back of my mind, I was slightly unsure as to what we could achieve, because we all knew each other so well,” he added. “So the fact that it all kind of fell apart was a good thing. It was one of those haphazard, serendipitous things that worked in our favour.”
The following record might not have been everything Smith could have hoped for when it came to the fan response or its commercial success, but the gap between the two was far more valuable than any other quantifiable metric of success. After all, it allowed him to maintain his core connection with music and enjoy making it for himself, rather than continuing to chase down the wrong path and pander to anyone’s expectations.
