The Top: Fever dreams and loose ends

The Top is the sound of The Cure after the apparent ending, with Robert Smith pulling the project back together while refusing to settle on a single direction. The oppressive architecture of Pornography has broken apart. In its place come psychedelic colour, distorted funk, nursery-rhyme unease and flashes of pop clarity. The result is unstable, sometimes exhausting and never anonymous.

Inside the record

“Shake Dog Shake” opens with scorched theatricality, announcing that restraint will not be the governing principle. “Bird Mad Girl” and “Dressing Up” drift through stranger, softer spaces, while “Give Me It” pushes agitation close to caricature. At the album’s centre, “The Caterpillar” finds a delicate balance: playful percussion, an instantly recognisable melody and lyrics that make infatuation feel magical and absurd. “Piggy in the Mirror” turns that humour inward, pairing self-disgust with one of the record’s most elastic grooves.

The Top lacks the coherence of the albums on either side of it, but coherence may be the wrong demand. This is a workshop with the doors open, capturing Smith as he tests which parts of The Cure can survive and which new versions might emerge. Not every experiment lands. Enough of them do, and the failures are rarely dull. Its place in the catalogue is not as a neglected masterpiece, but as the necessary, colourful confusion from which the next era could begin.