“Prayers for Rain” by The Cure

"Prayers for Rain" sits eighth on Disintegration, the Cure's eighth studio album, from 1989, and it may be the darkest corner of a very dark record. Robert Smith wrote the words, and critics have heard in them the dread of getting older that pushed him toward the album's bleaker, more inward mood. The music is credited to Smith, Simon Gallup, Roger O'Donnell, Porl Thompson, Lol Tolhurst and Boris Williams, and Smith produced it with David M. Allen.

What you get is a slow, sullen crawl, Smith and Thompson running their guitars through heavy flanging, delay and even tapes played backwards over Gallup's bass and Williams's drums. Ned Raggett called it "the most extreme song on an extreme album", and it is regularly counted among the band's strongest.

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