The Cure

The Cure made melancholy a form of popular architecture. Robert Smith turned English post-punk into a labyrinth of desire, guilt, strange humor and funereal beauty, passing through icy minimalism, abyssal goth, luminous pop and late elegies. From Three Imaginary Boys to Songs of a Lost World, the band always seems like the same haunting in a change of clothes: sometimes danceable, sometimes sepulchral, always too intimate.

Why listen to The Cure?

Sadness, here, is not a pose: it is an entire city lit from within.