Robert Smith has been the one constant member of the Remedy because the band fashioned in 1978, and he’s an icon in his personal proper. Smith’s massively teased out black hair and pink lips, and the inimitable pout and wail of his voice, make him as immediately recognizable as any frontman in different rock. The Remedy—as a band, as a sound, as an idea—is larger than the sum of its components, at the same time as its songs stay largely an expression of all of Smith’s passions and moods, from despair to infatuation.
Smith fashioned a band in Crawley with Notre Dame Center Faculty buddies together with drummer Lol Tolhurst and bassist Michael Dempsey within the mid-’70s to cowl their favourite Bowie and Hendrix songs. By 1978, they’d modified their identify from Straightforward Remedy to easily the Remedy, and had begun writing their first traditional songs, together with “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Killing an Arab” (later renamed “Killing One other”). The Remedy’s lineup remained in flux for years as Smith shifted the band’s sound from post-punk to goth to tuneful pop/rock, finally writing large High 40 hits like 1987’s “Simply Like Heaven” and 1992’s “Friday I’m in Love.”
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Over time, Smith has swung forwards and backwards between desirous to disband the Remedy or launch a number of back-to-back new albums. As an alternative, the band by no means stopped touring and recording, whereas the time between albums has gotten longer and longer. Earlier this month, the Remedy’s 14th album Songs of a Misplaced World was lastly launched after a 16-year wait. The somber and meditative album has earned almost common acclaim, however the place does it rank amongst classics like Disintegration and Seventeen Seconds?
14. Wild Temper Swings (1996)
Wild Temper Swings would’ve been an apt title for a number of Remedy albums that current artwork rock dirges alongside brilliant, upbeat pop songs. If something, although, the album that bears that identify doesn’t swing wildly sufficient between these extremes – “This Is a Lie” isn’t as seductively gloomy because the band’s goth interval, and “Mint Automotive” isn’t as charming and catchy as previous radio singles. It’s not essentially the Remedy’s fault that their gross sales dropped off in 1996; the identical was true of many of different rock’s largest bands, together with R.E.M. and Weezer. These bands made nice, enduring albums in ’96, although, and the Remedy didn’t.
13. Bloodflowers (2000)
Pornography and Disintegration have lengthy been revered as two of the Remedy’s greatest and most cohesive albums. Smith had by no means explicitly linked them collectively as a part of a collection till the discharge of Bloodflowers, nevertheless, which he mentioned accomplished a “trilogy,” with the Remedy performing all three albums in a collection of live shows in 2002. The second music on the album, the 11-minute epic “Watching Me Fall,” is the longest studio observe within the Remedy discography, however most of what follows feels minor and anticlimactic by comparability. Bloodflowers is definitely as ominous and portentous as its sister albums, however Smith appears to be the one one who considers it one of many Remedy’s best possible. “There may be an underlying class to the proceedings, courtesy the muted tone of the acquainted musical system involving languid instrumental introductions and leisurely pacing,” Steve Hochman wrote within the Los Angeles Occasions evaluate of Bloodflowers.
12. Three Imaginary Boys (1979)
Simply two years after punk rock had fully altered the UK’s musical panorama, a wealthy and diversified wave of bands emerged that have been experimenting with the chances opened up by punk. The Remedy would finally outlast and outsell all of their early contemporaries, however Three Imaginary Boys didn’t stand out as the most effective album in a outstanding crop of 1979 post-punk debuts by Pleasure Division, Gang of 4, the Slits, the Fall, the Raincoats, and the Pop Group. Flitting by way of 13 songs in 35 minutes, the Remedy’s debut is a uncommon glimpse at an iteration of the band that values brevity, with brief sketches like “Subway Track” and “Accuracy” alongside an odd deconstruction of Jimi Hendrix’s “Cunning Girl.” The album launched in America and a number of other different international locations as an alternative, Boys Don’t Cry, changed some weaker tracks with nice non-album singles, and provides a much more flattering portrait of early Remedy.
11. The Remedy (2004)
Ross Robinson grew to become synonymous with nu metallic after producing genre-defining debuts by Korn, Limp Bizkit, the Deftones, and Slipknot. By 2004, Robinson had already diversified his clientele and labored on acclaimed albums by On the Drive-In and Blood Brothers, however Remedy followers have been nonetheless a little bit anxious about Smith’s selection of producer for the band’s twelfth album. The Remedy isn’t “heavy” in a standard sense, however Robinson captures a loud, discordant sound that doesn’t go well with each music on the album, however works greatest on “Misplaced” and “Us Or Them.” Smith referred to as the self-titled effort his least favourite Remedy album in a 2024 interview selling Songs of a Misplaced World. “If The Remedy looks like a recapitulation of the band’s profession, it’s as a result of they’ve recorded songs very very like these earlier than,” Douglas Wolk wrote within the SPIN evaluate of the album.
10. 4:13 Dream (2008)
To observe up The Remedy, Smith employed one other eyebrow-raising producer, Keith Uddin, whose resume was stuffed with British woman teams like S Membership 7 and Atomic Kitten. If something, although, these albums merely show how sturdy and constant Smith’s imaginative and prescient of the Remedy is, as a result of “The Good Boy” and “The Solely One” sound like they may have come from the band’s traditional run. Maybe that’s partly as a result of Smith pared the group all the way down to a quartet, the smallest band on a Remedy album since 1984’s The High, for an easier, extra direct sound. “Compulsory bursts of darkish drama apart, this is among the band’s happier information, and it hits its peaks two-thirds of the way in which by way of, with a string of lilting pop songs,” Nitsuh Abebe wrote within the Pitchfork evaluate of 4:13 Dream.
9. Religion (1981)
Religion is the least-loved center baby of the sequence of foreboding albums the Remedy launched at the start of the ’80s that positioned them on the forefront of the goth motion. The dry manufacturing by Mike Hedges and hypnotically repetitive grooves often forged a spell, however Religion largely coasts on an aesthetic the band realized extra absolutely on different albums. Smith’s voice is distant and faint, as if he was shouting at you from the top of a hallway, and when the Remedy go into excessive gear for the quickest music on the album, “Doubt,” your complete band sounds shaky and able to crumble. 8. Songs of a Misplaced World (2024)
If the Remedy’s ’80s albums typically appeared to romanticize dying, Songs of a Misplaced World is in contrast a extra earthbound rumination on the tough realities of human mortality. Smith’s dad and mom and older brother Richard died in the course of the lengthy 16 years between Remedy releases, and it’s not simply grief however extra exactly regret that hangs over almost each music on the album. Three songs in a row, from “And Nothing is Eternally” to “Warsong,” characteristic the phrase “remorse,” and every time Smith appears to sing it with extra rueful depth than the final. Smith, reuniting with Bloodflowers producer Paul Corkett, strips the Remedy’s sound to a monochromatic combine dominated by Simon Gallup’s basslines, however these loud, lumbering tracks are a becoming match for the deep, aching unhappiness of the lyrics.
7. Want (1992)
Three years after their darkish opus Disintegration, the Remedy returned with “Excessive” and “Friday I’m in Love,” two of essentially the most sweetly blissed-out singles within the band’s catalog. Want’s densely textured tangle of guitar overdubs and suggestions on songs like “Minimize” and the reside staple “From the Fringe of the Deep Inexperienced Sea,” nevertheless, was well timed given the rise of heavier Remedy-influenced bands like Jane’s Habit and Smashing Pumpkins. Want was the Remedy’s final album with drummer Boris Williams and producer David M. Allen, each of whom have been an enormous a part of the sound of the band’s largest hits. Now the album feels just like the flawed however extremely pleasurable curtain name for his or her imperial interval. “The group’s peculiar sensuality and aptitude for melodrama have been refined and heightened to epic proportions,” Greg Kot wrote within the Chicago Tribune evaluate of Want.
6. The High (1984)
For the primary 5 years of the band’s existence, the Remedy’s most accessible songs like “Leaping Somebody Else’s Prepare” and “Let’s Go to Mattress,” have been launched as non-album singles, which allowed their industrial profile to rise at the same time as they launched more and more arty and moody albums. After their final non-album single, 1983’s “The Lovecats,” grew to become their first High Ten hit within the UK although, the Remedy adopted it with The High, a playful and eclectic album that options Smith taking part in violin, harmonica, and recorder. The one Remedy full-length recorded with drummer Andy Anderson, The High is a transitional document that few followers contemplate a masterpiece however there’s infectious vitality in songs like “Shake Canine Shake” and “The Caterpillar.”
5. Seventeen Seconds (1980)
Dempsey hated the darkish flip Smith’s songwriting had taken for the band’s second album and left earlier than the recording of Seventeen Seconds. Nearly everybody else, although, considers it a key second when Smith discovered his voice and unlocked the deep inside turmoil that might make the Remedy’s greatest songs so compelling. The band additionally sounds extra certain of itself with Gallup on bass. Seventeen Seconds is a gradual, atmospheric construct to the hypnotic facet two centerpiece “A Forest,” a music that appears like a blueprint for the sound the Remedy would broaden upon over the course of the ’80s.
4. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)
1987 was a yr that trendy rock, or different rock, or no matter folks wished to name it again then, made an enormous leap ahead in industrial visibility with hits like U2’s The Joshua Tree and R.E.M.’s Doc. The Remedy was proper behind them, however they have been lugging an extended, extra diversified album that felt like an omnibus of every part they’d completed over the earlier decade. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me step by step ramps up in depth much more intentionally than Seventeen Seconds, taking you on a journey from the simmering opener “The Kiss” to the lovestruck exhilaration of “Why Can’t I Be You?” and “How Lovely You Are,” earlier than ending with the climactic rockers “Shiver and Shake” and “The Battle.” “As a result of Smith hasn’t veered this far pop since he was a boy, a lot of the themes stick to you, and in a number of circumstances–my decide is ‘Simply Like Heaven,’ which will get off to a comparatively fast begin–his romantic vagaries have common potential,” wrote Robert Christgau within the Village Voice evaluate of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.
3. Pornography (1982)
“It doesn’t matter if all of us die,” Smith sings over blaring, seasick guitars on the Pornography opener “One Hundred Years.” If Seventeen Seconds and Religion seemed like a haunted home, Pornography seemed like a home on hearth. Tolhurst wallops his drums with grim depth on “The Figurehead” and “The Hanging Backyard” whereas Smith sings a few of the most intense lyrics of his profession, impressed by a depressed and drug-addled interval when he was contemplating ending the band and even perhaps his life. Regardless of adverse early evaluations and the shortage of any hit songs {that a} informal fan would acknowledge, Pornography grew to become the Remedy’s first High Ten album within the UK and stays extensively acknowledged as one in all their most important classics.
2. The Head on the Door (1985)
At 37 minutes, The Head on the Door was the final concise and compact album the Remedy made earlier than they started stretching out their songs on the bigger canvases of double LP albums after which CDs. It’s the immediacy of the songs just like the jangly faculty radio staples “In Between Days” and “A Evening Like This,” with the addition of Williams to the rhythm part that makes the band’s sixth album really feel just like the second when every part clicked into place. Even “Push,” an early instance of Smith letting the band set up a groove for greater than two minutes earlier than he begins singing has the rousing urgency of a extra conventionally structured pop music. The actual inventive breakthrough is “Near Me,” which strips away the guitars for an irresistible groove that sounds nothing just like the slick synth-pop dominating the charts within the mid-’80s however remains to be extremely inviting to listeners who might have had no time for the Remedy’s dour early albums.
1. Disintegration (1989)
Smith had good purpose to suppose that Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me was as massive because the band would get and that Disintegration can be solely for hardcore Remedy followers. As an alternative, it offered over 4 million copies worldwide, and in October 1989, “Lovesong” climbed to No. 2 on the Sizzling 100, blocked from the highest of the chart solely by Janet Jackson. Recording in Hook Finish, a studio inbuilt a Sixteenth-century home in Oxfordshire, Smith intentionally shrugged off crossover enchantment to make the Remedy’s most immersive and uncompromising album. He succeeded in that measure, however he additionally made an everlasting popular culture touchstone, with swooning melodies like “Photos of You” and “Lullaby” that dominated trendy rock radio, in addition to unrelentingly bleak songs like “Prayers for Rain” and “Untitled” that appeared to talk on to a technology of black-clad youngsters.
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