Half an Octopuss by The Cure

Half an Octopuss, a 1985 Cure EP on Fiction, comes from the period when Robert Smith was steering the band out of the black murk of Pornography and toward something brighter and poppier. Smith wrote the music and words and produced it himself, and the band around him that year counted Lol Tolhurst, Porl Thompson, Boris Williams and a returning Simon Gallup on bass.

It's a tidy snapshot of the Cure in transition: jittery, playful pop rock with Smith's wobbly, wide-eyed vocal and his guitar still carrying the band's gloomy shadow even as the tunes get lighter on their feet. "A Man Inside My Mouth" was the song from it that radio's countdowns latched onto, a nightmare of a title from the same year that gave the world "Close to Me".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.