“Plainsong” by The Cure

"Plainsong" raises the curtain on Disintegration, the Cure's eighth album, from 1989, and it's the band at its most enormous and most mournful all at once. Robert Smith sings and wrote the words, playing guitar and keyboards alongside Porl Thompson on guitar, Simon Gallup on bass and keys, Roger O'Donnell on keyboards and Boris Williams on drums, with Lol Tolhurst among the credited composers. Smith produced it with David M. Allen.

It's widely rated among the band's best, hailed as the perfect way into the album and one of the great opening tracks anywhere; Vice paired it with "Pictures of You", the song that follows, as a one-two punch of an introduction. It also served as the B-side of the Spain-only "Disintegration" single and was reworked for the 2018 remix album Torn Down.

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