“The Head on the Door” by the Cure | Album Review

Dissecting the Cure’s most pop-oriented offering for its 40th anniversary.

This album review delves into the Cure’s most pop-oriented offering for its 40th anniversary.

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Genre: Alternative, Rock, New Wave

Label: Fiction

Release Date: August 30, 1985

Vibe: 💯

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

The Head on the Door is this marvelous little pop music gem from a band that, before and since, haven’t exactly been known for producing them. That’s more of a perception and reality gap, if we’re being completely honest, mainly because of how exceptional a pop songwriter Robert Smith is at his core, but, outside of “Friday, I’m in Love” (a true delight that I reminisced about here) and “Just Like Heaven,” the group is still primarily known for goth grandeur. Sweeping affairs like those found in Disintegration and their most recent masterpiece, 2024’s *Songs of a Lost World.* Those records are more preoccupied with exploring themes like grief, heartbreak, and loss, emotional cues that make them sound more cohesive as a unit. By contrast, The Head on the Door is a study in everything those records aren’t: air-tight, frequently danceable alt-rock that, for all its disparate influences, doesn’t have a wasted second in its running time.

This album, perhaps more than any of their other studio efforts, benefited from some right-place-right-time pop music appetites. Interest in alternative music was nearing its initial populist peak, giving way to dozens of synth-pop and new wave groups who’d influence the next two or three generations of punks, goths, and misanthropes. Platforms like MTV (and, eventually, spawn like VH1 and YouTube) ensured those mid-decade hits would stay in heavy rotation for years and years, effectively inducing demand long after you’d consider that peak period done and dusted. That doesn’t happen if the music itself isn’t timeless, however. In his speech inducting the group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Trent Reznor said of the Cure: “They've changed the face of popular music indelibly during their [history] without ever having to compromise their sound or aesthetic.” Of this album in particular, he added: “I hadn’t heard anything like it before. A lot of darkness I felt in my head was coming back at me through the speakers and it blew my mind.”

Yet, for all of its mainstream sparkle, The Head on the Door isn’t what I’d call a feel-good album. These songs grapple with the isolating effects of aging (”In Between Days”), a rain-soaked break-up (”A Night Like This”), and drug-induced psychosis (”Screw”), among other heady themes. When at its most upbeat, the disco-adjacent “Close to Me,” Smith writes about “the disappointment of dreams made real” and “this sense of impending doom.” Their transition from indie darlings to full-blown global sensations was fueled by Smith’s highwire act of balancing pop star sensibilities without losing an ounce of the gloomy intimacy that made his voice so distinctive. He and the band would go on to make more outsized, anthemic music during the back half of the 80s, but I’d argue that both sides of Smith’s rock persona never crystallized quite as well as they do here.

He wasn’t the only significant contributor to this critical turning point in the Cure’s discography, however. By the time recording began, the group’s lineup had changed significantly from the lineup that produced LPs like Faith and Pornography. Joining Smith and keyboardist Lol Tolhurst were Porl Thompson, who’d presided over guitar and keyboard duties in the group’s early days, and drummer Boris Williams, previously of the Thompson Twins. It almost marked the return of Simon Gallup on bass, who’d previously left the Cure in 1982 after his relationship with Smith had become strained to the point where the two didn’t speak for 18 months. Song after song, I found myself singling out Gallup as Head’s unsung MVP. His melodic basslines infuse nearly every song with a sonic hook that always falls somewhere between brooding, as on the fantastic closer, “Sinking,” and bright and funky, as on “Close to Me.” His playing provides the glue that holds a lot of these songs together.

It’s worth noting that, from 1983 to 1984, Smith had also expanded his sonic palette by, in more ways than one, breaking form. His collaborations with new wave contemporaries Siouxsie and the Banshees translated into the looser whimsy of the Cure’s compilation Japanese Whispers, which includes the hit “The Love Cats” and, more divisively, into a neon-drenched fever dream on The Top. The latter was influenced by 1983’s Blue Sunshine, an album by Siouxsie's side project, the Glove —a collection of tracks that, although I didn’t have time to verify this with any field testing, would surely be amplified texturally with some psychedelic drugs. During this stretch of his career, Smith would often record demos by himself, using drum machines and overdubs of guitar and synth to frame his voice. Though it pushed him past his limits physically, leading him to relinquish his role in the Banshees due to exhaustion, it gave him a sense of creative control that he’d entrench as the Cure’s frontman in the decades that followed.

The Head on the Door is, for me, a shining example of how to do more with less. The pop gloss on these tracks is undeniable, but what’s genuinely brilliant about them is how they build such beautiful, sleek machines out of simple, often strange components. The flamenco guitars and castanets on “The Blood” are a cock-your-head-to-the-side-in-intrigue kind of choice, but it all snaps into place with the satisfying click of a kid’s jigsaw puzzle. Smith’s vocals are also overdramatic in an amusing, soap opera sense, adding even more depth to the song than maybe it deserves on its face. As written, it’s a goofy, quasi-send-up of a Christian acolyte, but it morphs into this danceable, Latin-goth hybrid that’s striking in its flair. You get similarly delightful oddities in “The Baby Screams,” featuring some unhinged vocal overdubbing, and “Push,” which sounds like the Cure’s take on a mid-80s Van Halen record. From Death Cab for Cutie to Vampire Weekend to Phoenix, you can still hear the deep cuts in a lot of 21st-century alternative music, whether those acts know or acknowledge it or not.

The neo-noir aesthetic is also present in spades, most effectively on “Kyoto Song” and “A Night Like This.” The former balances this eerie elegance with a stereotypical Eastern keyboard riff, which, even if it is a little dated, still carries at least a hint of dread with it. The latter dials the emotional intensity up several notches, featuring Smith lyrics that can be read as a threat or an emo love proclamation:

I'm coming to find you if it takes me all night
A witch hunt for another girl
For always and ever is always for you
Your trust, the most gorgeously stupid thing I ever cut in the world

Add a terrific, period-specific saxophone solo from Ron Howe in for good measure, and you’ve got one of the Cure’s most enduring, arena-ready dirges of all time. I remember being blown away by how hard it hit seeing it performed live, with the lyrics taking on an even more ghostly quality now that Smith is in his sixties. Then, of course, you can’t talk brilliantly obtuse without mentioning “Close to Me,” an unflinching exercise in claustrophobic screw-turning. There isn’t much to the arrangement—mainly a drum loop, minimalist keyboard lines, and bass. No lead guitar, no additional pyrotechnics, and it doesn’t need any. The vocals are whispered, not sung, making the unraveling much more personal-sounding. It’s lean, it’s darkly comedic, and it’s utter perfection.

What makes The Head on the Door stick, 40 years after its initial release, is how rangy it is. There are moments of real light here. Even joy if you squint hard enough. But even those rays of sunshine don’t give you any clear-cut resolutions to overarching questions. The highs and lows never feel reconciled. Instead, it’s as if it begins a conversation between the two that can never really end. It’s messy business, just like life itself, and, if you take the lyrics and mood at face value, it’s clear the band wants you to take some comfort in that. In a pop culture world hooked on clean narratives and overproduced sentiment, this record would be considered radical if it came out tomorrow. I suspect it would also find an audience, much like it did back then.

This album made the Cure a household name, vaulting them into the UK Top 10 and, more importantly for their commercial prospects, establishing them as an undeniable presence stateside, especially on rock radio. Though it only peaked at No. 59 on the Billboard 200, goths, punks, pop kids, and sad teens all found a piece of themselves in it. They were all given permission to let themselves feel “too much,” to want everything, to sound soft and severe in the same sentence, and to be unapologetic about any of it.

In the years since, Smith has described this record as a sort of rebirth, which I somewhat agree with. It’s not like Head is wholly divorced from their earlier work. I don’t think it would exist without those first few records. But, if we’re talking a refresh with an eye towards a more universal appeal, then yes. It’s an absolute triumph.

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What’s your favorite Cure song or album? Let me know in the comments.