The Cure: Greatest Hits

At the time of this release, this seminal English band had somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 years and some 11 albums behind them, each spawning a chart hit or three. That’s a lot of history to dig through to come up with your own “best of” collection. These songs were chosen by Robert Smith himself, carefully culled to show the band’s progression in the '80s from jittery, punk-bred guitar pop, to gloomy atmospheric goth originators and, lastly, to a synth-driven disco-pop outfit. In the early ‘90s, that sound morphed into a more mature, integrated synthesis, with a perfect and delicate balance of guitars and dance beats; the single, “Friday I’m in Love” is a pinnacle moment in their later career. Two tracks, “Cut Here” and “Just Say Yes,” were previously unreleased, with the latter originally intended for 2000’s Bloodflowers, and the single “Never Enough” was originally released on an oddities collection called Mixed Up. So, unless you’re something of a Cure completist, chances are you don’t have some of these singles in your collection. And having them all in one place provides a neat and tidy overview of their impressive career, which is still unfolding, some thirty years after their inception.