‘Pornography’ is my favorite album The Cure ever made by a considerable margin. It is considered the final part of their gloomy, downbeat trilogy, after which the band moved into a notably more upbeat, poppy direction. But where its predecessors ‘Seventeen Seconds’ and ‘Faith’ lacked a certain degree of urgency, ‘Pornography’ is a twisted piece of work that forces its message of doom and depression onto the listener in all of its claustrophobic glory. The much denser arrangements and production definitely play a role in making the album sound so different than its predecessors, but the song material allows them to be like this.

In a way, ‘Pornography’ feels more like a studio project than any previous album by The Cure. The three albums they made before this one do feature a bit of studio trickery, but mostly sound like the result of a band playing together and recording the songs once they are rehearsed well enough. Despite the arrangements on ‘Pornography’ being so dense that a lot of thought must have gone into them before recording them, many of the layers feel like they have been attempted spontaneously and stuck around. Unlike on previous albums, it often sounds like there are more than three people playing in a way that benefits the album.

Of course, all of these changes would have been meaningless if the song material was not up to a certain standard. Fortunately, this is the best collection of The Cure songs to date. There is a dark, menacing vibe to all of the songs, but each of them sounds different. It is understandable that ‘The Hanging Garden’ was chosen as the first single, as it is clearly the most accessible of the bunch, with its incessant tom gallop by Lol Tolhurst and the relative memorability of Robert Smith’s lyrics. It is good, but nowhere near as good as the aggressively nightmarish soundscape of the fantastic opener ‘One Hundred Years’, which is probably my favorite song by the band.

While the full album could be described as very dark gothic rock, the second half of ‘Pornography’ is notably more depressed than the first few tracks. This already starts with the stoically downtrodden ‘Siamese Twins’ and is then amplified by the beautifully sad ‘The Figurehead’, which is elevated to near-masterpiece status by Smith’s haunting lead guitar lines. The album ends in a rather experimental fashion, with the synth-laden, but no less dark ‘Cold’ and the very abstract, atmospheric title track. These songs keep building rather than having a traditional song structure, but as an epilogue to an almost impenetrably dark album, that works really well.

‘Disintegration’ has the reputation of being the most depressing pop album of all time, but it is nowhere near as oppressive or hauntingly dark as ‘Pornography’ is. The album certainly is a lot to take in for anyone who hears it for the first time, but it has a couple of characteristics that The Cure has not had before or since. And those characteristics happen to be things I like to hear a lot. Smith’s voice will never be my favorite in gothic rock – Andrew Eldritch and Carl McCoy have that covered – but the tortured character of his voice is a perfect fit for the music here.

Recommended tracks: ‘One Hundred Years’, ‘The Figurehead’, ‘A Strange Day’