When I first heard Disintegration, which I bought on reputation alone, I lamented that I didn’t get into the Cure when I was a teenager. My thirties were too late to start a Cure phase—too late for the gloomy goth rockers to sink their hooks into my soul as deeply as they were meant to be (I even blamed my very 80s child mother for not exposing me to them).

Then, I had a child, and at six months old, she is certainly not too young for a Cure phase. As we’ve tried different strategies to get her to sleep, we’ve discovered that the most reliable tool is the Rockabye Baby series’ collection of Cure lullabies. And as those delightfully sweet arrangements have played on repeat in our house the last few weeks, I’ve found myself obsessing over the Cure with the same earnestness I thought I had missed out on by getting into them later.

That new obsession has gotten me to finally check out Wish, which I had assumed for years was an unabashed pop backlash to the dirge of Disintegration, based solely on the sugary hit “Friday I’m In Love.”

Boy, was I wrong.

In a lot of ways, Wish seems to reflect Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, offering a bell curve with Disintegration in the middle. Where Kiss Me was indeed the group’s pop chart breakthrough and had tracks like the funky “Why Can’t I Be You?” and “Just Like Heaven” (perhaps the best pop song of all time?), it also contained many tracks that wouldn’t have been out of place on the group’s darkest records. In fact, I don’t revisit Kiss Me more often because some moments are just so dour.

In the same way, Wish offers a brilliant balance of Robert Smith & Co’s popcraft with their dramatic darkness. Pop tracks like “Friday” and “High” shimmer brightly, perfectly accessible to even the most mainstream audience. “Wendy Time” mirrors the ironic goth funk of “Why Can’t I Be You.” But even these upbeat moments don’t feel jarring against the darker tracks—which make up most of the tracklist. In fact, those more funereal moments feel like an expansion of the band’s work on Disintegration where they managed to convey deep gloom without sacrificing accessibility. “Open,” um, opens the record with a propulsive post punk squall that mixes the fiery chaos of “The Kiss” with Disintegration’s theatrical sheen. “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” is a massive, brooding epic, but it never drags through its eight-minute runtime. “Apart” easily could sneak onto the previous record’s tracklist without anyone blinking.

But where Wish excels is in combining the Cure’s contradictions into a bittersweet musical confection. The most depressing lyrics on the disk are tucked into the rambunctiously catchy “Doing the Unstuck,” a jangling pop tune about suicide. “Letter To Elise” is a beautiful pop ballad that isn’t bogged down by its own deep sadness. The energetic “Cut” rocks with a similar manic energy as “Fascination Street.”

Sonically, it’s absolutely fascinating. The Cure had long established themselves as masters of atmosphere as early as Seventeen Seconds, but the glistening textures of their gothic soundscapes are augmented here by detuned guitars, swirling modulation, and guitar feedback, giving a thicker shoegaze sound than the Cure had before (Smith notably named Chapterhouse as an influence on the record), particularly on the whirling closer “End.” “Friday I’m In Love” was also infamously sped up accidentally when Smith forgot the Varispeed control on the tape deck was engaged, raising the song’s pitch a quarter-tone to land between D and E flat. It’s a subtle difference in frequencies, but given both the tonal relationship to the rest of the songs and the fact that we so rarely hear music recorded outside of conventional pitches, it catches your ear in a way that can’t be entirely credited to its jubilant hook.

It’s certainly a more complex and rewarding record than the mistaken Bubblegum Pop narrative I had made for it. And hearing it as a whole, it’s immediately clear that the Cure was not squandering the creative peak they had reached on Disintegration. They allowed more room for pop songs, sure, but a majority of the tracks on Wish come from the same place as its antecedent’s relentless gothic drama. It’s no mistake that this record hit number two on the Billboard Chart (and number one in their native UK). While Disintegration remains the best record they ever released, Wish is arguably the most definitive Cure album, combining everything they did best into an impressive seventy-minute package that never feels bloated. And that’s on top of capping off one of the best four-album runs any band has ever released.