Cure

David Bowie was one of the fundamental influences on Robert Smith's musical education. His ability to shed skins, move across different genres and, above all, continually reshape the language of rock left a deep mark on the leader of the Cure, who would find in that very Bowie-esque idea of music free from stylistic boundaries one of the models for his own artistic quest. But among Bowie's many albums there's one that, more than any other, changed forever the way Smith conceives music and sound: "Low".

Released in 1977 after "Station To Station", the first chapter of the famous Berlin trilogy, "Low" marked one of the most radical turns in Bowie's career, especially in its second half, dominated by instrumental compositions, abstract atmospheres and experiments born partly out of his collaboration with Brian Eno. An album with a stark, minimalist approach, destined to remain one of the most important of the London-born artist's entire career. The city of the Wall becomes an ideal topos for the record, capable of inspiring its decadent spleen. The album's second side, in particular, ends up as a kind of musical commentary on the atmosphere of the German metropolis split by the Cold War's Iron Curtain. The Thin White Duke conceives a work — initially titled New Music, Night And Day — entirely devoted to experimentation. With the German pioneers of electronic music — Kraftwerk, Neu! and Tangerine Dream — but also ambient music itself as crucial reference points. And yet "Low" would also achieve considerable commercial success, reaching No. 2 on the UK Chart and No. 11 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart in the US — thanks above all to some of the more song-oriented tracks on the first side, where the icy atmospheres of kraut-rock merge with the r'n'b warmth supplied by the seasoned Alomar-Murray-Davis rhythm section.
For Robert Smith it was a revelation, one that leads him to describe it, still today, as a work of "fucking genius".

Over the course of his musical education, the Cure's frontman had absorbed a wide range of influences, from Nick Drake to Jimi Hendrix, by way of that art-rock scene of the Seventies that had turned instruments into tools for building atmospheres and soundscapes, going well beyond simple melody. But no album affected him the way "Low" did. Smith still remembers his first listen perfectly. He had ordered the record on cassette and, coming home from school, found it waiting for him. He listened to it in his mother's car during a trip to a garden centre: "While she did whatever mums do at garden centres, I was listening to 'Low'. I was completely blown away: it changed my whole perception of sound. The way something could sound completely different — everything I was hearing was astonishing."
An impression that hasn't faded with the passing decades. If anything, Smith still regards "Low" as an absolute touchstone: "When I put it on even today, the sound, all of it, is just fucking genius. 'Low' was the album that had a huge impact on me, on the way I see sound. No other record has ever had that effect on me."

An influence that would leave deep traces in the music of the Cure as well. That attention to atmosphere, to the use of instruments as textural, tonal elements, and to the construction of sonic environments would find some of its most complete expressions in albums like "Pornography" and "Disintegration". For Smith, then, "Low" isn't simply one of the great albums in rock history, but the record that showed him just how far the boundaries of music could stretch.

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14/09/2026