The Cure

You have to go back to the Cure's early days, to the jittery new wave of 1980's "Boys Don't Cry", to find mournful maestro Robert Smith giving brave faces a shot — trying to laugh about it long before giving in to the crushed-heart overflow that is 1989's "Pictures of You". Few artists convert melancholy into pop art better than Smith and his revolving cast of bandmates. The thick smear of red lipstick runs in the direction of Next Steps.

After flirting rather deliriously with pop on 1996's Wild Mood Swings, Smith and his latter-day cohorts decided to greet the 21st century with a warm embrace for the gloom-starved goth elements among their fanbase and delivered Bloodflowers in 2000 — which was billed as the final installment of a trilogy taking in Pornography and Disintegration. Sink into "The Last Day of Summer". There's more from the happy miserablists in Deep Cuts.

"Six different ways inside my heart," sings Robert Smith on the quirky, almost perky "Six Different Ways". But the title could just as well refer to Smith and company's multiple musical moods. If you glance back to the band's 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys, you'll find more jaunt than dirge in its pop-punk simplicity, compared to the angular sonic wasteland of a track like "At Night", released only a year later.

The sounds and personnel have shifted, but one thing's remained constant over the course of the Cure's 30-year existence: Robert Smith, he of the ghostly pallor, shock of jet-black hair, and smudged red kisser. The band began life in the late '70s with jumpy art-punk before planting the seeds of goth with such gorgeously gloomy tracks as "A Forest" and "All Cats Are Grey". They barely stuck around long enough to watch those seeds take root before they were off again on Smith's never-ending quest to plumb the musical depths of despair, and, on tracks like the '80s breakthrough sparkler "Just Like Heaven", scale the delirious heights of alterna-pop innovation. We've gathered all of the crucial points in between on one playlist — the many moods of one magnificent band.