The Cure

Simultaneously more accessible and ambitious than any of the Cure's previous albums, the double album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me finds Robert Smith expanding his pop vocabulary by tentatively adding bigger guitars, the occasional horn section, lite-funk rhythms, and string sections. It's eclectic, to be sure, but it's also a mess, bouncing from idea to idea and refusing to develop some of the most intriguing detours. Even if Kiss Me doesn't quite gel, its best moments – including the deceptively bouncy "Why Can't I Be You?" and the stately "Just Like Heaven" – are remarkable and help make the album one of the group's very best.

Later hailed as one of the key goth rock albums of the '80s and considered by many hardcore Cure fans to be the band's best album, Pornography was largely dismissed upon its 1982 release, witheringly reviewed as a leaden slab of whining and moping. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between: Pornography is much better than most mainstream critics of the time thought, but in retrospect, it's not the masterpiece some fans have claimed it to be. The overall sound is thick and murky, but too muddy to be effectively atmospheric in the way that the more dynamic Disintegration managed a few years later. For every powerful track like the doomy opener "One Hundred Years" and the clattering, desolate single "The Hanging Garden," there's a sound-over-substance piece of filler like "The Figurehead," which sounds suitably bleak but doesn't have the musical or emotional heft this sort of music requires. Pornography is an often intriguing listen, but it's just a bit too uneven to be considered a classic.

For a long time, maybe 15 years or so, Robert Smith rumbled about the Cure's imminent retirement whenever the band had a new album ready for release. Invariably, Smith said the particular album served as a fitting epitaph, and it was now time for him to bring the Cure to an end and pursue something else, maybe a solo career, maybe a new band, maybe nothing else. This claim carried some weight when it was supporting a monumental exercise in dread, like Disintegration or Bloodflowers, but when applied to Wild Mood Swings, it seemed like no more than an empty threat, so fans played along with the game until Smith grew tired of it, abandoning it upon the 2004 release of his band's eponymous 13th album. Instead of being a minor shift in marketing, scrapping his promise to disband the Cure is a fairly significant development since it signals that Smith is comfortable being in the band, perhaps for the first time in his life…