...The outing ties in with the release of a new Cure album on the Fiction label, through Polydor. It has the working title of 'Pornography', but as the Polydor spokesperson observed this week: "Whether or not it will actually go out under that title remains to be seen."
- NME, 6 March 1982
It did. Pornography, the oppressively bleak fourth CURE album - the climax of their masterpiece trilogy - was released on this day in 1982.
I remember a song, an impression of sound.
Then everything is gone, forever.
From the NME review, 8 May:
For more than one reason we are better off not picking about at particular parts of the whole. For one thing, too close a look at the poetic permutations to hand on the lyric sheet, taken with the occasionally irksome whine of Robert Smith, and he and his easily-stereotyped friends can quickly become the tiresomely self-analytical young 'sensitives' I've always feared The Cure might be. For those ambitious for profundity, vacuity is but a clumsy couplet away.
However, I feel that 'Pornography' was not designed to be objectified or probed, but taken en bloc as a very dense wash of emotional colour, portraying one soul on a leash, fighting back the panic in the dark. And, as such, it really works. The confessional returns, fragile, frightened, horribly forlorn, and very finely drawn. A killer of its kind.