By way of Charles Baudelaire’s poem, “Spleen,” this book deconstructs the grueling story of The Cure’s masterpiece Disintegration—one fitful heartbreak at a time.

This book begs the question: why should an album make you feel good?

In 1989, The Cure’s Robert Smith was going to turn thirty years old. His fears and anxieties of age—having not yet written his pinnacle album—caused Smith to embark on the band’s undoing with Disintegration. The result was an LP drenched in melancholy sublime, a beautiful decree of breaking down to build anew. From the fame and notoriety of The Cure after their hit, “Just Like Heaven,” to the departure of the only other consistent band member, Lol Tolhurst, it’s clear that the grisly spiral into the depths of pain is stamped throughout Disintegration.

This book explores the depths of Smith’s masterpiece by way of the French Modernist Charles Baudelaire and his poem, “Spleen.” Much like Smith, Baudelaire took his temperament and softened the edges of sorrow, transforming it into a mass of supercharged emotion: a tenuous concoction of sin and sex, lust and monstrosity, self-hatred and fear… all cauterized by the malaise (and acceptance) of eternal melancholy.

And through Disintegration lies Robert Smith’s corpus—his spleen. It’s here that The Cure’s upheaval and Smith’s heroic martyrdom became the catalyst for his masterpiece.