much recently, The Cure are a band that has been a constant in my life for a long, long time. My first introduction to the band was through a cover of their song 'The Hanging Garden', by AFI on their A Fire Inside EP. Strangely, I found out almost immediately it was a cover, which is unusual as almost every other cover song I've been introduced to in my life I spent sometimes years thinking of as the original, before somebody proving me wrong, haha. The Cure are a really interesting band, with such a varied history and discography. Their earliest material definitely is more punk influenced, a bit power-pop. Pretty quickly, the post-punk era happened, though they were much darker than a lot of the other bands, and helped to move that genre into 'goth' scene it would evolve into. Eventually, the band started to embrace more pop sounds, with a darker edge, but that would evolve into just sort of straight-up pop/alt-rock. Following that, they had another shift, in the late '90s/early '00s, which I'm not sure entirely how to describe, but it's cool, haha. Today's song is from their 1985 album The Head on the Door, and is a great example of them playing with poppy, catchy ideas early on. It must have felt like quite a surprise to fans of the band at the time who loved their darker side, but in hindsight, it was a great move, and really showed the versatility and skill of the band.