The End of the Eighties, Track 22

“Closedown”
The Cure
Disintegration
1989

Like Siouxsie’s Peepshow album, the Cure’s Disintegration was blasted far too loudly from my dorm room that freshman year at Bowling Green. It sets a mood, to be sure, and that mood was often the morose, brooding, angsty mindset of a gothy punk poet on the verge of young adulthood.

“Closedown” is the album track that really gets the blood churning, and I had this to say about it in 2011:

The liner notes on the original album say “THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO BE PLAYED LOUD SO TURN IT UP,” and the opening tribal drums of “Closedown” are relentless. You feel them thrumming in your chest with urgency at any volume. The immediacy of those four minutes of music – one of the shortest songs on the album – is underscored with a mere 11 lines of lyrics compacted into 40 seconds of song, making every turn of phrase, every word matter. The lyrics are well within lead singer Robert Smith’s doom and gloom wheelhouse, but the music feels uncharacteristically hard. While Cure songs of the era are typically dense, “Closedown” actually seems to apply pressure, actively pushing the air out of the listener’s lungs, suffocating them.