“I have never felt happy about it”: The one album Robert Smith was never satisfied with
There are a few LP contenders in The Cure canon that fans can point to as potential irks for longtime frontman Robert Smith.
You can go back right to the start, a 19-year-old Smith rubbed the wrong way by Polydor’s art department, slapping a generic modernist domestic cover on 1979’s Three Imaginary Boys debut. Perhaps it’s his psychedelic The Top five years later, dreamed-up during a period of instability in the band and doubts as to The Cure’s future. Or we can jump to 1996’s Wild Mood Swings, shaped amid Britpop’s heyday, where Smith grappled with his own pop relevancy for the first time since his band’s founding.
It turns out that Smith’s major album gripe was triggered much later. By the arrival of the 21st century, whatever mid-1990s wobble was had swiftly felt like ancient history when a whole host of new rockstars across nu-metal, pop punk, and indie revivalists all lined up to pay their respects. Bloodflowers would be met with acclaim as well as 2004’s eponymous follow-up, and that year, The Cure would be featured in the MTV Icon series for a new generation.
When it came to album number 13, echoes of their debut’s label interference reared its head again, pushing Smith to make concessions to the record’s eventual finished product that dogged The Cure captain ever since.
“If I’m really honest, I was trying to make an album in 2008, which was a double album, and it was really odd,” Smith revealed to BBC’s Sidetracked in 2024. “It had all kinds of stuff on it, instrumental stuff – and I was pressured into reducing it all down into a single album… I have never felt happy about it.”
“I bristle a little bit about it,” Smith furthered, going on to imply desires to revisit the album for a future, expanded director’s cut. “At some point, before I fall over, I’m determined…”
There’s a definite haphazardness to 4:13 Dream. Erratically veering between pop numbers echoing The Cure’s 1980s pomp and their engulfing alternative rock shroud that’s largely defined their last 25 years, such disparate material never quite gels as a cohesive whole, a nagging curiosity as to just how those missing songs might have elevated the album’s grander traverse.
It turns out that The Cure cut as many as 33 songs during the 4:13 Dream sessions, several seeing life as B-sides, ‘Christmas Without You’ morphing to ‘It Can Never Be The Same’ from the 40 Live (Curætion-25 + Anniversary) concert DVD, and Smith mentioning over the years ‘Lusting in Your Mind’ and ‘Please Come Home’ frustratingly still locked in The Cure’s studio vaults.
It would take The Cure another 16 years to drop their latest album, Songs of a Lost World, topping both the UK and US albums charts, the latter for the first time ever. Such time passing, however, may well have been compounded by Smith’s displeasure at the 4:13 Dream regrets that still plague him all these years later.
“I learnt a lesson, and maybe that’s why we didn’t make another album for such a long time!” Smith confessed. “I hated the idea of delivering it to the deadline. It was my own fault. I should’ve just ignored everyone. I was so sickened by the process of [being] commodified, and it really did upset me a lot.”
