The Cure album Robert Smith called his all-time favourite
There has always been a contrarian streak in Robert Smith. Right at the height of his career, when he was being celebrated as the ultimate wonderkid of goth music, he turned around and rejected the label, later stating, “Goth was like pantomime to me. I never really took the whole culture thing seriously”. When it comes to the topic of his own favourite album by The Cure, he handles it with the same left-field view.
I get it, though – it’s a tough and tiring question. Smith is probably asked about it every day, and he gives almost every interview, and that has probably been the case for decades of his career. It’s such a common ask but a deeply weighty one. Would you ask a parent to pick a favourite child? Ask them to decide the best out of the creations they made, carefully raised and nurtured?
But at the end of the day, parents, too, would probably have an answer for you somewhere deep down. Maybe Smith is simply bold enough to spit it out—even if his opinion goes against the grain of the majority of his own audience.
“My own favourite Cure albums aren’t the best-selling ones,” he said. By now, the world knows well that artistic worth and sales figures don’t line up. It’s often the case that an artist’s best work doesn’t wind up as their best-selling, often because it’s the more experimental or out there stuff that the band leans towards loving or feeling proudest of.
That’s definitely the case for Smith as his favourite comes in the form of what was accused of being a career-killer. “Maybe Pornography is my all-time favourite, and it’s that record that was said to be commercial suicide,” the singer said in 2000, handing the crown to the band’s 1982 album that landed as a shock to fans.
It was endlessly darker than what had come before. For a band that launched with more upbeat songs like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, this album’s deep and unrelenting dive into depression and drug use caught fans and critics off guard. The critical reception at the time reflected that as well, with many panning Smith’s self-indulgent approach to the project.
But Smith loves it, perhaps due to it’s darkness and the meaning it holds. The singer said of the album and the process of making it, “I had two choices at the time, which were either completely giving in or making a record of it and getting it out of me,” suggesting that the decision to focus on the record was a life-saving move. So while the album sounded like nothing but gloom to listening ears, perhaps it has always fondly sounded like resilience to him.
But overwhelmingly, his favourite Cure albums speak to an artist very much locked in on the path of loving the underdogs in his own discography. “I think WMS [Wild Mood Swings] is way better than, for instance, Seventeen Seconds, even if that’s probably the record that even Cure-haters have in their collection,” he said, putting a later stage 1990s album ahead of their more popular sophomore effort.
While other artists might fight against the question of favourites, Smith comes in hard. Not only does he give an answer, but he near-enough disowns all the albums left off his list, concluding, “I only like Pornography, Disintegration, Wish, WMS and Bloodflowers.”
