Why Pornography still sounds the way it does
A note on the production choices — drum treatment, flanging, mix-bus compression — that made The Cure's fourth album harder for the band to make and harder for their audience to place.
Pornography was recorded at RAK Studios in London between January and April 1982 with Phil Thornalley engineering and Chris Parry producing. By the band's own testimony — Smith, Tolhurst, Gallup have each written or spoken about it — the sessions were the most difficult of their career to that point.
The drum treatment
The album's most identifiable signature is the drum sound: heavily compressed, early-gate-reverbed, and placed unusually forward in the mix. Thornalley has attributed the approach to a desire to give each hit "a room" of its own rather than to fit the kit into a coherent stereo image.
Flanging and detuning
"One Hundred Years" and "A Strange Day" both use aggressive flanging on guitars and, less audibly, on vocals. The effect is an MXR unit driven hard, and — on the title track — a second layer of tape-flange applied at mixdown.
Why it sounds claustrophobic
The compression used on the master bus was, by the standards of 1982, severe. Dynamic range across the record is narrower than on Faith, and narrower still than on the more open Seventeen Seconds. The combined effect is a record that sits loud in the speakers without ever opening out.