Wish: Bright light, deep water
At their commercial peak, The Cure made a record that holds euphoria and collapse in the same wide-open sound.
Wish opens with feedback and closes with the word “end”, but between those points it contains some of The Cure’s most life-affirming music. The popular memory centres on “Friday I’m in Love”, understandably: it is a near-perfect pop song, light on its feet and built to survive endless repetition. Yet the album surrounding it is bigger, stranger and more emotionally volatile than that single suggests.
Inside the record
The guitars are the defining texture. “Open” arrives in a dense, circling roar; “High” makes that shimmer buoyant; “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” turns it into a vast dramatic landscape. The band sounds unusually physical, with Boris Williams’s drumming and Simon Gallup’s bass driving songs that might otherwise dissolve into atmosphere. Even the softer moments carry tension. “Apart” and “Trust” are direct without being plain, while “To Wish Impossible Things” pares everything back to a quiet devastation.
Not every choice is equally strong, and the album’s sequencing deliberately swings between emotional extremes. That instability suits it. Wish is about wanting the moment to remain while knowing it cannot, whether the moment is ecstatic, romantic or destructive. Following Disintegration was an impossible task; The Cure succeeded by refusing to reproduce it. They made a brighter record with its own depths, and one whose scale captures a band at the height of its confidence.