The Cure: Every album, ranked

For Robert Smith, black has always been the new black. In a career spanning almost 50 years, the haystack-haired singer has steered his band The Cure through the gloomy aftermath of punk, patented much of the goth aesthetic, dabbled in psychedelia, and recorded a huge canon of all-time classic alt-pop anthems. With the release of their first album in 16 years, Songs Of A Lost World, The Cure have reclaimed their throne as alt-rock elder statesmen, a seminal influence on multiple younger generations and musical subcultures, from shoegaze to grunge, emo to nu-metal and beyond.

The shorthand caricature of The Cure’s sound would be Smith’s whimpering adolescent angst set to a spangled churn of minor-key guitars, yet these perennial cult favourites have actually amassed a remarkably eclectic body of work over the decades. Their opening suite of youthful albums was rooted in the monochrome angularity of post-punk, but during the 1980s they also embraced roaringly romantic pop, jazzy textures and stadium-sized goth-rock dynamics. An enduring fondness for psychedelia also runs through Smith’s musical hinterland, as manifested in Hendrix and Doors covers, a fondness for trippy guitar effects, and a flair for phantasmagorical imagery that taps a rich tradition of English literary surrealism ranging from Lewis Carroll to Edward Lear to Mervyn Peake.