The Cure “The Head on the Door” released on this day 30 years ago: August 26, 1985. The album reached #7 on the UK charts and #59 in the US, spurred by two hit singles: “Close To Me” and “In Between Days” with their “shiny, sleek production and laser-sharp melodies” that veered away from the darkness of previous albums and into a poppier direction. However, songs tracks like “Kyoto Song,” “The Baby Screams” and “The Blood” (three of my favorite on this album) are tinged with dark minor chords and sadness (well, also flamenco guitars and castanets on “The Blood”). As Tim Sendra of Allmusic writes, The Cure “figured out how to make gloom and doom danceable.”

I bought this album soon after its release, probably sometime in the fall of 1985 and listened to it incessantly. I especially remember my Maxell tape-copy playing on my headphones during the rehearsals for my junior high musical (the decidedly non-goth “Nashville Jamboree”), waiting to go onstage to sing and dance in a ridiculous cowboy hat and boots while sporting my Robert Smith-like spikey hair. The on the weekends my friends and I would head to the YMCA for the teen dances where we’d flail about, dancing our new wave hearts out The Cure.