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Picking 30 songs out of the vast treasure trove of gems that is the Cure's discography is, admittedly, an impossible task. What follows, then, is just one of the many possible "Top 30" selections of the best tracks recorded by the British band. A playlist that tries to balance all the various incarnations of Robert Smith and co.: from the three imaginary boys of their post-punk beginnings, to the champions of darkwave, to the architects of pop hits that are shadowy and brilliant in equal measure. Naturally, given how difficult this selection was, we had to sacrifice the later stretch of their career in particular, almost universally seen as less significant than the key periods of the '80s and '90s. That said, we won't hide our anxious curiosity to hear a new Cure album - possibly even this year - should the long-running rumors finally be confirmed. In the meantime, we offer you this thirty-stop journey through their glorious past.

30. This Is A Lie

The Cure of the Nineties are less prolific and creative compared to the previous decade, but they retain a good dose of their trademark melancholy, adding a veneer of troubled maturity, as in the case of “Wild Mood Swings”. The 1996 album isn’t among the most memorable in their saga, but it holds a few high-intensity moments, like this romantic track, with vaguely melodramatic tones, in which the arrangements grow airier, complete with a string quartet, while Robert Smith renews the most desperate charm of his singing to warn us about the lies that poison our life together, making mutual understanding impossible (“Why each of us denies every other way in the world”).

29. The Last Day Of Summer

“Bloodflowers” is regarded by many – including this writer – as The Cure's true swan song, the last record on which Smith and co. still managed to draw blood, before the inexorable post-2000 decline. An album in which the English band sets aside every commercial temptation, focusing on taut rock numbers and evocative ballads, like this ode to the end of summer. And so it was that the quintessential winter (or autumn) band of all exposed the most melancholic and crepuscular nature of the sunny season, especially as it draws to a close, dragging away with it emotions and memories that will never return. Or, simply, leaving behind a feeling of cold and emptiness (“The last day of summer/ Never felt so cold”).

28. Close To Me

At the time it was almost blasphemy. A single so pop that it risked excommunication from the early dark and post-punk fans. And yet this sinister, sticky little chant has by now become a classic of the English band. Credit also goes to Tim Pope's harrowing video, in which Smith & co. are locked inside a wardrobe that plunges off a cliff. The frontman would describe the experience as “the 12 most uncomfortable hours I've ever spent”, with the director ending up “dropping the wardrobe – with us still inside – into a huge tank filled with 1000 litres of water... It might sound fun, but all I could think about was dying a slow, painful death”. Nothing so far-fetched, considering that poor Robert also happens to suffer from claustrophobia!

27. Lullaby

The famous horror single from “Disintegration” isn't the album's best track, but it undoubtedly marks a standout moment in The Cure's saga and remains their best-selling 45 (No. 5 on the UK chart). Credit goes to an arachnophobic nursery rhyme, masterfully declaimed by a hallucinating Robert Smith, lost inside one of his darkest claustrophobic nightmares, yet with that unmistakable touch of dark-humoured irony that leads him to sing “The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight”. The inspiration, however, is a real one: “As a child”, Smith has recounted, “I had a recurring nightmare: I'd go to bed, fall asleep, and get eaten by a giant spider”. Also to blame were some frightening lullabies his parents used to sing him: “For me the lullaby has always had a sinister meaning, as if it said: sleep well, or you won't wake up again”. Once again, Tim Pope perfectly captured its spirit, directing a masterful video: one of the 37 he made for The Cure between 1982 and 1997, the London director having worked with some of the greatest artists on the English scene of the Eighties (David Bowie, Queen, Soft Cell, Talk Talk, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Style Council, among others).

26. Apart

Often underrated or dismissed as simply the record featuring the frivolous “Friday I'm In Love”, “Wish” is actually a more than respectable entry point for The Cure into the new decade (the Nineties), following the triumphs of the previous one. A pleasant, interesting album too for the ease with which it brushes up against the sounds of the then-thriving shoegaze movement, leaving its mark on the indie-pop bands to come as well. But amid the more energetic tracks, capable of filling the American stadiums where the band, now at the peak of its success, has taken to playing regularly, there also creeps in this soft, atmospheric ballad in which Smith murmurs his desperate dilemma: “How did we get this far apart? We used to be so close together”.

25. Shake Dog Shake

A strange fate has befallen “The Top”, The Cure's fifth album, disliked by many but loved by a considerable share of fans. It certainly marks a shift towards pop-rock compared to the dark trilogy that preceded it, but it would be reductive to frame it solely in those terms. It came out in 1984 but is heavily shaped by Robert Smith's experiences in the two preceding years, when, following the release of “Pornography” and bassist Simon Gallup's departure, the band had come close to splitting up altogether. The frontman then decided to join his friend Siouxsie's Banshees, with whom he had already played in support of the Join Hands Tour, contributing to her “Hyaena”. Shortly before that, he had launched, together with Steven Severin (the Banshees' bassist), the side project The Glove, with manager Chris Parry's involvement, and legend has it that it was Parry himself who steered The Cure towards a more pop direction, similar to the one the Banshees were pursuing. The fact remains that after the nightmares of “Pornography”, The Cure opted for the lightness of the “fantasy trilogy” of singles (“Let's Go To Bed”, “The Walk” and “The Lovecats”), included on the “Japanese Whispers” compilation, and carried on down that road with “The Top”. Even though Smith was emerging from alcohol-fuelled devastation that had sent him spiralling into psycho-physical collapse. So it's hardly a coincidence that the album opens with the tarantella-like scream of “Shake Dog Shake”: a vibrant track, with unprecedented rock shadings, steeped in dissonant flanged guitars and reverb that help conjure up yet another thoroughly successful hallucination. It would open the historic “Live In Orange” concert film, shot in the Roman theatre of the French city, released in 1987.

24. Killing An Arab

This selection couldn't leave out the debut single that started it all. Troubles included. Because there will always be those who stop at the letter of the title and misread its meaning: from neo-Nazi skinheads who turned it into a moronic anthem to the various associations that accused it of racism. Even Hansa, the German label that had the band under contract, refused to release the track. In the end it was the far-sighted Fiction that put it out as a 45. Robert Smith would try to explain to everyone the song's literary origin, namely an episode drawn from Albert Camus's existentialist novel "The Stranger". Once the misunderstandings were cleared up, what remains is the power of this stark, taut track, true to punk tradition, yet built within an aura of mystery through exotically tinged melodic lines and a spectral, anguished voice. A classic.

23. Play For Today

Now a rowdy pogo anthem at gigs, complete with the whole crowd singing along to its instrumental chorus, this second track from "Seventeen Seconds" actually marks one of the stages in the descent into darkness that opens the first chapter of the dark trilogy of the '80s. It moves at a decidedly livelier pace than the rest of the tracklist, no doubt thanks to a churning, flanger-drenched guitar that underpins Smith's listless vocal as he works out his own version of darkwave, born from an encounter with the icy atmospheres of records like Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" and Siouxsie and the Banshees's "The Scream". Crucial in giving the track, and the album's overall sound, its backbone is Simon Gallup's four-string contribution, from then on the band's true backbone and Smith's veritable alter ego.

22. The Walk

We mentioned the "fantasy trilogy" of singles that, after the sacred dark trimurti, lightened up the Cure's sound. Of the three 45s that made up the "Japanese Whispers" compilation, the most brilliant one - at least for this writer - is this driving synth-pop number, effectively put together by the duo of Robert Smith (vocals, guitar, keyboards) and Lol Tolhurst (drum machine, keyboards). An irresistible synthetic gallop, in which Smith's yelps and vocal flourishes chase after over-excited keyboard riffs set to an almost eurodisco beat. Also worth noting is the role behind the mixing desk of producer Steve Nye, chosen because of his work on Japan's "Tin Drum". "He was able to make the electronic instruments sound more natural, and that's what we wanted," Tolhurst would recall.

21. All Cats Are Grey

The second act of the dark trilogy is also the most solemn. Influenced by Joy Division's "Closer" and its catacomb-like approach to rock, on "Faith" Smith and co. take on long, slow-building tracks defined by the sound of keyboards and six-string bass (or baritone guitar), which often stand alongside or replace the guitar altogether. Within the "guitar, bass, drums with a big void in the middle" sound the Cure's leader had in mind, the keyboard becomes an essential complement. In this sly, majestic "feline ode" (on the subject, let's also recall "Lovecats"), the vocal comes in after a long intro, only to quickly give way to a funereal, keyboard-dominated coda. A contemplative abyss built entirely on measured, drawn-out rhythms, in which compositional conventions - including the bridge-chorus structure - fall away in favor of a spectral, black-and-white liturgy. Grey, actually. Innocence is lost, the three imaginary boys are now nothing but a memory.

20. Last Dance

Rebuilding only after destroying, or rather disintegrating, the past. The title of the Cure album that hit stores on May 2, 1989 already makes clear the intent behind a crucial turning point. Beloved by millions of sensitive souls for the aching romanticism that runs through it, "Disintegration" is in fact a sumptuous, captivating record, melancholic and autumnal, intensely desperate and desperately intense - a true concept album, in which the songs are inseparably bound to one another, forming a single unified work. Here, through the metaphor of the last dance, Smith tells of the anguished farewell to a love now lost, to a girl who has by now become a woman, drifting away for good.

19. M

Just a single letter for the title, but plenty of invention in its content. A tiny gem, tucked among the shadowy grooves of "Seventeen Seconds". M stands for Mary Poole, Robert Smith's partner, to whom the Cure frontman dedicates a song that only seems lighter and more carefree: in truth it's desolate and aching, its latent drama proof that this love was also deeply suffered and, at times, even desperate. All of it hidden behind a quirky melodic line, almost childlike in its enchanting simplicity.

18. Trust

A matter of trust. The man asks the woman to trust him. "The hardest part for you, to put your trust in me" - he says. But she is cold and detached, and all seems lost. Among the more or less hidden treasures of "Wish" is this other romantic ballad, in which Smith evokes yet another relationship coming to an end, in a kind of musical version of Hal Hartley's film of the same name. The arrangement is gorgeous, built around keyboards, piano and violin. The minimalist piano line by Perry Bamonte stands out in particular - his first appearance in the band's line-up after years as a loyal roadie.

17. The Kiss

The monumental double album "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" (1987), and its accompanying tour, opened with these six-plus incandescent minutes of scorching, distorted psychedelic guitars, building a nerve-wracking, alienating atmosphere that hypnotizes the listener like a spell. Until the almost unexpected eruption of Smith's desperate scream, tearing through a track with distinctly Baudelairian overtones. Guitarist Paul Thompson's contribution is crucial, injecting further neurotic toxins into the band's sonic magma. The Cure's noise lesson proves that even noise can be bent to melancholy and to the darkest depths of darkwave, even if we're already in different territory here - no less sinister and fascinating.

16. Cold

The soul's frost. The most sorrowful requiem on "Pornography". Long, solemn organ phrases and electronic flashes of lightning prop up a soundscape that couldn't be more gothic, while Smith finally finds the courage to confront the oppressive sense of death that haunts him: “Ice in my eyes and eyes like ice don’t move/ screaming at the moon/ another past time/ your name like ice into my heart/ everything as cold as life…”. A choral tour de force from the band, carved out of (boiling) ice.

15. The Holy Hour

The holy hour marks one of the most solemn moments of "Faith", and of the Cure's entire discography. Two minor guitar chords, et voilà. The tempo is excruciating, the harmony utterly bloodless, almost invisible, and the voice stays distant, wrapped in a crepuscular melancholy. There is no light; there is no life. Everything is held in a chiaroscuro embrace in which the first hours of the day have wilted away. Amid distant tolling bells (funeral bells, of course) and the blurred outlines of the keyboards, Smith gives voice to all his desolation ("I kneel and wait in silence, as the people slip away, one by one, into the night"), telling of "the sacrifice of penance".

14. Just Like Heaven

And yet even the Cure have been to Paradise. At least for the time (just over 3 minutes) of this elegiac love song, which Smith himself considers among the peaks of his songbook ("I'll never write anything as beautiful again," he once said). The unusually radiant lyrics were inspired by a seaside trip with his future wife Mary. In the video, Smith dances with her: "The song is about kissing and passing out on the floor. Mary dances with me because she's my girlfriend. The idea is that a night like that is worth 1000 hours of hard work," he would later reveal. The opening line ("Show me, show me, show me, how you do that trick") refers instead to Smith's passion for magic, reframed here as feminine seduction. A graceful melodic line and punchy keyboard riffs frame one of The Cure's perfect pop songs.

13. Siamese Twins

The final act of the dark trilogy finds the Cure on the brink of implosion, with a Robert Smith immersed in his alcoholic fog and one step away from a psycho-physical collapse. And yet, as often happens, it's precisely on the edge of the abyss that creativity explodes. “Pornography” is now recognized as one of the Cure's undisputed masterpieces, if not their absolute peak. Every track is a station on a via crucis that will nonetheless lead Smith to exorcise his demons and be reborn. This hypnotic dance is no exception, marked by total rarefaction and extreme dilation of time and space, performed and played as if in a trance, between languid guitars and syncopated rhythms. A liturgy of redemption to be carried out while “the world has disappeared laughing in the fire.” It works too through the memory of painful moments, like those of a love story that began with kisses and hopes (“The first colours, The first kiss”) and ended with the lover seemingly giving in to temptation, to a “red light”; with that final crescendo brimming with resentment (“Is it always like this?”).

12. If Only Tonight We Could Sleep

Branded by a pair of scarlet lips on the cover, “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me” is also the Cure's erotic album, where sex is partly freed from the death drives that oppressed it on “Pornography” and brought back to a warmer sensuality. With more romantic overtones than ever, this aching, Eastern-flavoured mantra is set over a whirl of psychedelic guitars, with Smith rediscovering the darkness of the golden days, longing to sleep in a bed of flowers and fall under a spell, finally slipping into the depths (“If only tonight we could sleep/ In a bed made of flowers/ If only tonight we could fall/ In a deathless spell/ If only tonight we could slide into deep black water”). The guitar interplay is wonderful, laced with echo and reverb, one of the standout feats on their most underrated album by far.

11. Charlotte Sometimes

One of their most beloved singles, released right after “Faith”, with “Splintered In Her Head” as the B-side. For both songs, the Cure drew inspiration from Penelope Farmer's 1969 children's book “Charlotte Sometimes”. The A-side is a danceable, romantic track in which Smith seems to identify with a sweet, dreamlike feminine ideal, the only lifeline against the genuine anguish gripping him: “Night after night she lay alone in bed / Her eyes so open to the dark/ The streets all looked so strange/ They seemed so far away/ But Charlotte did not cry”. It would also become a staple of their live shows.

10. 10:15 Saturday Night

Forget Saturday Night Fever. The most anticipated night of the week can also be sadly desolate and minimal: an evening spent alone at home, waiting for the phone to ring and wondering where she is, until you're reduced to tears thinking about what happened the day before, while the tap drips (“Waiting for the telephone to ring/ And I’m wondering/ Where she’s been/ And I’m crying/ For yesterday/ And the tap drips”). That's the story told in this brilliant track that opened the 1979 debut LP, “Three Imaginary Boys”, and also filled the B-side of the “Killing An Arab” single. A track that stands as the most thrilling musical manifesto of the early Cure, still fully steeped in post-punk: it starts with the ticking of a clock over restrained rhythms, then gradually ramps up the tension, with a sense of claustrophobia built through the obsessive repetition of the bass and guitar figures, before exploding into a liberating crescendo on the chorus.

9. A Night Like This

A sax solo on a Cure track? At the time it was almost sacrilege. Yet this nocturnal ride, which added a jewel to “The Head On The Door”, has over time become an absolute classic for Smith and co. Credit goes to the solemn, epic pace set by the drumming and the vibrant guitar riff, to yet another aching vocal performance from Smith, and to that crooked soul solo, entrusted to Ron Howe's anguished sax, which sharpens the track's dramatic climax. It's another tale of a love on the edge of collapse (“Say goodbye on a night like this/ If it’s the last thing we ever do”), the diary of an emotional earthquake that drives Smith to cry out “I'm looking at you, looking at me, as if you're made of stone as you walk away.” No longer gothic, but just as pessimistic and desperate: a gem that redeems an otherwise unremarkable album.

8. Plainsong

The apotheosis of grandeur that is "Disintegration", right at the album's opening. Like a clear statement of intent for everything that follows. Grandiose, majestic, desperate, starting with the unforgettable instrumental intro: two minutes and 40 seconds of psychedelia with an almost orchestral flavor, moving with a seductive gait and rich in refined sound effects, which gradually give way to Smith's languid voice and lyrics steeped in gloomy, romantic gothic hues, telling of Eros, of Thanatos, and of the terrible, magnificent daze each of us feels before the person we love, whose smile, like a flash of lightning, tears through the darkness and destabilizes us, making us feel as though we're teetering on the edge of the world. A spine-chilling sonic spell, in which the keyboards paint atmospheric landscapes and the guitars slash through the dark like blades.

7. All I Want

A bare-bones intro, with dissonant, repeated guitar phrases underpinned by the bass, before a drum hit bursts the track into another of the English band's choral climaxes, with keyboards weaving atmospheric textures and guitars slashing and tearing. This time Smith is less romantic than usual, showing his wilder side, hurling out demands like: "Stanotte mi sento come un animale/ Stanotte sto ululando dentro. And all I want is to be with you again. And all I want is to take you like a dog". Even though this degradation ("stanotte sto cadendo così in basso") is nothing more than yet another attempt to deceive himself, in a vain search for a way out. Set ablaze by a splendid guitar crucible and masterfully sung by Smith, it's one of the great rock feats from that inexhaustible musical miscellany called "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me".

6. Boys Don't Cry

Who says the Cure had no impact on the 1970s too? One of the English band's signature songs came out in 1979, revealing to the world Robert Smith's supreme talent for building catchy pop melodies, in a track that tells the story of a boy who has lost hope of winning back the love of a girl he's lost, and who tries in vain to hide his feelings because, as the chorus goes: "Boys don't cry". Candid, moving, irresistible, it condenses into just over 2 minutes all of Smith's nostalgic nature, looking back both to the age of innocence of rock music, the 1960s, and, in an existential sense, to a lost childhood, destined to be recalled with regret. With a raw, electrifying riff that leaves no escape.

5. A Strange Day

Another priceless gem from "Pornography". The atmospheric, anguished sounds take on languid, relentless cadences, while an increasingly desolate Smith distills pearls of decadent poetry, with a surreal incipit like "Give me your eyes, that I might see the blind man kissing my hands". If the keyboards build the (sick) atmosphere, it's the jangling guitars that tear through the song's fabric, paving the way for the constant, disorienting crescendos and rhythm changes that create a definitive sense of disorientation. The Cure's art of darkness at the peak of its hypnotic power.

4. How Beautiful You Are

A guitar arpeggio, a harmonica, then another memorable keyboard riff to seal the incipit of one of the Cure's melodic peaks, included on the double album "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me". Another desperate love song, with desolate, Baudelairean lyrics that close with the chilling lines “And this is why I hate you/ And how I under stand/ That no-one ever knows or loves another” (“Ed è per questo che ti odio/ E come capisco/ Che nessuno mai può conoscere o amare un’altra persona”). A parable told through a complex interweaving of three personas: man, boy and child. With the latter spontaneously expressing what adults are barred from by the laws of appearances, in an increasingly arid and alienated world. A cold, poignant snapshot of the impossibility of communication and of love.

3. A Forest

Another immortal classic from the English band, a triumph from "Seventeen Seconds" and an unmissable must in their live setlists, where it's usually stretched out and repeated at length amid general jubilation. It's the manifesto of Smith's dead-end forest-world, in full claustrophobic, paranoid delirium. Heightening the sense of disorientation is the irresistible rise and fall of bass and guitar, which after about six minutes of a trip, lose themselves in the tangle of a solo that coils in on itself until it fades out on the cadenced notes of a bass that beats like a pulsing heart. Smith sings, lost, "intro the trees" in a strangled, desolate voice, which fades with its "again and again" into the threatening darkness of the woods.

2. The Funeral Party

The definitive plunge into “Faith”. A descent into a nocturnal, intimate, shadowy, funereal poetry: a “funeral party”, precisely, where one attempts the superhuman effort of being led by a desperate, perhaps unattainable faith. Robert Smith's voice intones a desolate requiem, a despairing oration on the loss of innocence and the awareness of death, in a kind of pagan liturgy that, once and for all, forges the myth of the most gothic Cure. And yet the melody is sweet, the rhythm soft, almost reassuring. As if in a serene, resigned acceptance of the inevitability of the end.

1. One Hundred Years

“It doesn’t matter if we all die” (“Non ha importanza se moriamo tutti). Almost the natural consequence of the resignation of “Funeral party”. The chilling incipit of “Pornography” immediately leaves you breathless: the obsessive march of the electronic drums, the spectral keyboard choirs, the searing guitar stabs set the stage for Smith's frantic declamation in the throes of a full-blown nervous breakdown. As the drum machine hammers relentlessly, the band builds a thriller-like crescendo through a pile-up of claustrophobic riffs, then thrown into disarray by a convulsive break, in a macabre sequence of death (“Over and over we die one after the other”). It's the dark apotheosis of the Cure, the song that rightfully enshrines them in the pantheon of pale souls of the darkwave era.

(Contributions by Mauro Roma and Lorenzo Salzano)

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02/02/2026