Last year, I said that An Autumn for Crippled Children’s Try Not to Destroy Everything You Love should have stolen them the title of “The Cure of Heavy Metal” from post metallurgists A Year of No Light. That album’s heavy use of moody synths, drum machines, and melodramatic grand pianos betrayed a great love for the Goth Rock legends that mixed surprisingly well with the blistering black metal guitars and shrieked vocals.
On last year’s All Fell Silent, Everything Went Quiet, AAFCC leaned even further into the goth, new wave, and post punk influence, making this sound almost like a Cure-worship album with added black metal elements, rather than the other way around. In either case, it certainly works.
Perhaps there is no candidate for Pop Superstar more unlikely than The Cure’s Robert Smith. With his frizzy moptop, pale complexion, and full face of makeup, Smith was the face of the 1980s goth rock movement and its obsession with darkness—the kind of guy that Satanic Panic folks would point to to prove that society was in the icy grip of the Dark Lord.
At some point in the mid to late 2000s, Gorillaz founder Damon Albarn decided that leading the world’s best cartoon band wasn’t enough, and started to aim a bit higher.
After the manic scattershot of 
