I already had deep album cuts playlists of Def Leppard, Radiohead, Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, and Roxy Music, and I wanted to do one more of this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class before the induction ceremony on Friday. And this is the one I kind of waited and put off doing because they have the biggest discography of the whole bunch, arguably the most impressive one, depending on your taste, the band with the most really beloved, consequential albums that are treasured by their fans. You may not think of The Cure as a really exceptional success story, but very few bands have been as consistently big as they have been for 40 years straight. They grew their fanbase really steadily for 15 years, and then sustained it over a generation -- as far as bands that formed in the early days of punk and are still going at a huge level, it's really U2 and then The Cure, although unlike U2, Robert Smith has kind of kept the show going as the only constant member over the years.

The Cure are a band that make me think of how the weird tribal, territorial nature of alternative rock at one point that has if not dissipated then certainly relaxed over the years. I recall a lot of pitting The Cure and The Smiths against each other, and pitting both of them against tougher-sounding (usually American) bands, "goth" being wielded like an insult the way "emo" and "hipster" would be later. This is, of course, partly because I became a big rock fan around 1992, when "High" and "Friday I'm In Love" positioned The Cure as this incredibly uncool band who still had their ridiculous '80s hair, almost like if the Flock of Seagulls guy was still on MTV with the Flock of Seagulls hair in the early '90s. Recently at a band practice, one of my bandmates tried out a new guitar tone on a song, and I said it sounded like The Cure, and there was this funny moment where people in the room were split on whether that was a good, bad, or value neutral thing to say.

But as the '90s and 2000s went on and I shook off the self-conscious rejection of the '80s of my youth, I slowly found myself coming around to The Cure, although mostly in the form of a casual appreciation of their catchiest songs. I'd listen with delight to "Close To Me" on a mix CD over and over, but I'd rarely check out their albums, beyond buying a cheap cassette of Pornography or hearing Disintegration at a friend's house and kind of getting the idea that the really did earn their sadsack goth rep and didn't write pop songs all the time. But they're also really fucking good at writing pop songs.

The Cure deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Push
2. Shake Dog Shake
3. Disintegration
4. Cold
5. Three Imaginary Boys
6. The Baby Screams
7. Hey You!!!
8. From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea
9. The Perfect Girl
10. Bananafishbones
11. 10:15 Saturday Night
12. Plainsong
13. One Hundred Years
14. Play For Today
15. The Blood
16. Prayers For Rain
17. The Drowning Man

Tracks 5 and 11 from Three Imaginary Boys (1979)
Track 14 from Seventeen Seconds (1980)
Track 17 from Faith (1981)
Tracks 4 and 13 from Pornography (1982)
Tracks 2 and 10 from The Top (1984)
Tracks 1, 6 and 15 from The Head On The Door (1985)
Tracks 7 and 9 from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)
Tracks 3, 12 and 16 from Disintegration (1989)
Tracks 8 from Wish (1992)

I thought about trying to be more completist and covering all of The Cure's albums, including the four they've made in the last 25 years (a fifth possibly on the way this year). But honestly, they have so many really long songs that I just didn't feel like I had the room. Brevity is just not their thing, they've only made one album that ran under an hour since 1986.

One interesting thing about The Cure's early period is that for several years, they'd seemingly deliberately release their catchiest uptempo songs as standalone singles, leaving them off of the proper albums entirely, including "Boys Don't Cry," "Jumping Someone Else's Train," "Let's Go To Bed," and "The Love Cats." This had the effect of making the earlier albums darker and more cohesive, although it didn't seem to hurt them commercially (Pornography, for example, was their first top 10 album in the U.K.). But it also gave rise to a lot of compilation releases, including Boys Don't Cry, Japanese Whispers (which was the band's first album on the Billboard 200), and Standing On A Beach aka Staring At The Sea, which is, along with Disintegration, one of the band's only multi-platinum releases in the U.S.

One of the side effects of this practice is that The Cure's first few albums can feel almost unremittingly gloomy. Things start to get a little lighter and more varied on The Top, (the band's only album with "Love Cats" drummer Andy Anderson, who died of cancer last month). And then there's an almost The Wizard of Oz B&W-to-color switch that flips with The Head On The Door and its opening track, "In Between Days," like they finally decided to put the pop songs on the albums. As someone who still really loves The Cure best as a singles band, some of this stuff is still a bit too downtempo for me to want to listen to all the time, but I found some songs I really love on here, particularly "Push." And "From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea" is very justified as the band's biggest live staple from their post-'80s output.

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