Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me by The Cure

Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, the Cure's seventh studio album, came out on Fiction in May 1987, a sprawling double album recorded at Studio Miraval in Correns, France, with David M. Allen producing alongside Robert Smith. Smith framed it as a record in two halves: one taking the bits of the band's past he liked best, the other made of things they'd never tried before. The result lurches gleefully from mood to mood, a funhouse tour of everything the Cure could be.

There's the swooning pop rush of "Just Like Heaven", which became the band's first top 40 hit in America. There's "Why Can't I Be You?", all giddy, bouncy delirium, and "Hot! Hot! Hot!", which gets its funk on with a wink. Then the lights go down: "The Kiss" is a long, snarling storm, and "Torture" and "Hey You!!!" push the band into stranger corners, while "Catch", "How Beautiful You Are", "One More Time" and "The Perfect Girl" keep the romance flickering.

It was the album that pulled the Cure into the American mainstream, the first of their records to crack the Billboard 200's top 40. It went platinum in the US and was a hit in plenty of other countries too. Reviews at the time were mixed to positive, fond of its eclectic streak but not so fond of its length. Time has been kinder: it's now held up as one of their best.

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