Best Ever
Rock Album?

The first sound on Disintegration is a synthesizer that seems to be waking up from a long sleep. It swells, it breathes, and then those guitars enter — not attacking, but surrounding you, enveloping you in a sound so thick and so sad that you understand immediately: this is going to take a while. Seventy-two minutes, to be exact. Robert Smith needed every second.

Smith was turning thirty when he made this album, which sounds like a joke but wasn’t. He’s spoken about the existential crisis that accompanied the birthday, the sense that youth was ending and something else — something heavier — was taking its place. That weight is in every track. Disintegration is a breakup album, a depression album, a staring-at-the-ceiling-at-3am album. It’s also, improbably, one of the most commercially successful albums The Cure ever made. Turns out a lot of people wanted to stare at the ceiling together.

The production is a cathedral. Smith and David M. Allen layered guitars until they became weather systems, keyboards until they became architecture. “Plainsong” opens the album with two minutes of pure atmosphere before anyone sings a word — a statement of intent that says: we’re not in a hurry, and neither should you be. When Smith’s voice finally arrives, thin and wounded, it floats on top of the density rather than cutting through it. He’s not fighting the sound. He’s surrendering to it.

“Pictures of You” runs seven minutes and change, built on a four-chord progression that never resolves, never releases the tension it establishes in the first bar. The lyrics are Smith at his most nakedly emotional — remembering a love through photographs, knowing the photos are lies, treasuring them anyway. The guitar solo, when it arrives, doesn’t show off. It keens. It mourns. It sounds like someone crying in a language you almost understand.

The title track is the album’s black hole, eight minutes of gravitational pull that bends everything around it. “I never said I would stay to the end,” Smith sings, and the music suggests the end is already here, has always been here, that entropy is the only constant. The song builds and builds without ever climaxing in the traditional sense — it just expands until it fills all available space, then fades, leaving you emptied out.

“Lovesong” was the hit, and it’s a fascinating outlier — a relatively straightforward declaration of devotion that Smith wrote for his wife. At four minutes, it’s practically a pop single by this album’s standards. But even here, the guitars shimmer with melancholy, the synths swell with something like grief. The Cure couldn’t make a simple love song if they tried. Their DNA won’t allow it.

“Fascination Street” provides the closest thing to momentum, a bassline that actually moves, drums that approximate urgency. But the lyrics are about addiction, numbness, the search for feeling in a world gone flat. Even when The Cure rocks, they’re rocking toward oblivion.

The sequencing is crucial. Smith arranged these songs to create a journey from resignation through despair to something almost like acceptance. “Untitled,” the closing track, is instrumental — six minutes of synthesizers that feel like dawn after a very long night. It doesn’t resolve the album’s emotional questions. It just suggests that morning comes eventually, whether you’re ready or not.

Critics at the time wondered if Smith could sustain a career making music this slow, this sad, this uncompromising. Thirty-five years later, Disintegration has outlasted almost everything released alongside it. The sadness turned out to be sustainable. More than sustainable — necessary. Sometimes you need seventy-two minutes to feel everything you’ve been avoiding.

Put it on when you’re ready to go under. The water’s fine.

The Cure: The Best Ever is gorgeous despair, stretched to infinity. Is Disintegration the Best Ever Gothic Rock Album? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The 2010 Deluxe Edition adds a full disc of demos, instrumentals, and the legendary ‘Homesick’ B-side.
• Purists prefer the rawer master of the original 1989 CD pressing.
• The 180-gram vinyl reissue gives the low end room to breathe.