The Cure vs Echo and the Bunnymen comes down to two numbers before anything else. The Cure have made 14 studio albums, from Three Imaginary Boys in 1979 to Songs of a Lost World in 2024. Echo and the Bunnymen have made 13, from Crocodiles in 1980 to The Stars, the Oceans and the Moon in 2018. Two bands out of the same post-punk moment, one album apart, and forty-odd years of very different shapes.
I have drawn both as tube maps, so this comparison is written from the credits outwards rather than from the record reviews inwards. What the maps show is not which band was better. It is which band held its line-up together.
The Cure vs Echo and the Bunnymen: the studio albums side by side
| Band | Studio albums | Debut (UK peak) | Best charting | Most recent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Echo and the Bunnymen | 13 | Crocodiles (1980, 17) | Porcupine (1983, 2) | The Stars, the Oceans and the Moon (2018, 11) |
| The Cure | 14 | Three Imaginary Boys (1979, 44) | Wish (1992, 1) | Songs of a Lost World (2024, 1) |
The Cure started lower and climbed. Three Imaginary Boys reached 44, Seventeen Seconds 20, Pornography 8, Disintegration 3, and then Wish went to number 1 in 1992 and number 2 in the United States. Songs of a Lost World returned them to number 1 in 2024, sixteen years after 4:13 Dream.
Echo and the Bunnymen peaked earlier and harder. Heaven Up Here reached 10 in 1981, Porcupine reached 2 in 1983, and Ocean Rain reached 4 in 1984. That is three albums inside four years, and nothing since has matched them on the chart.
What the Echo and the Bunnymen map shows
Echo and the Bunnymen's 13 studio albums sit on a map with an unusually stable spine for the first decade. Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant and Les Pattinson form the original 1978 line-up, with a drum machine rather than a drummer, and Pete de Freitas joins on drums in 1980.
Then the map breaks in two places at once. McCulloch leaves in 1988 and de Freitas dies in a motorcycle accident in 1989. Reverberation (1990) arrives with Noel Burke on vocals and Damon Reece on drums, and it is the only album in the catalogue where the two longest lines are both absent. The band stopped in 1993 and reunited in 1997 with McCulloch, Sergeant and Pattinson. Pattinson later left again, leaving McCulloch and Sergeant as the two lines that reach the present.
What The Cure map shows
The Cure's map is the opposite shape: one line that never breaks, and a great many that do. Robert Smith runs through all 14 studio albums. Nobody else does.
The band began in 1976 as Malice, became Easy Cure, then The Cure in 1978, with Smith, Lol Tolhurst and Michael Dempsey. Tolhurst moved from drums to keyboards and left in 1989. Simon Gallup's bass line is the one that leaves and comes back, which on a tube map is a gap rather than an ending, and gaps are the detail fans look for first.
The names that fill the rest of the sheet include Porl Thompson, Roger O'Donnell, Boris Williams, Perry Bamonte, Reeves Gabrels and Jason Cooper. Several of them arrive as additional players and end up as members, which is why The Cure's map has more lines crossing more often than the Bunnymen's does.
Which band had the wider reach
The Cure, comfortably, and the chart record is the honest way to show it rather than a sales figure I cannot verify. They have had UK number 1 albums in two different decades, thirty-two years apart, and charted in the top 15 in the United States with Disintegration, Wish and Songs of a Lost World.
Echo and the Bunnymen's success is concentrated in the UK and concentrated in the 1980s. That is not a lesser catalogue, it is a narrower one, and on a wall it reads as a tighter, cleaner diagram. The Cure's map is denser because more people passed through the band.
Where the two catalogues actually meet
Both bands came out of the same 1978 to 1980 window, both were routinely filed under gothic rock by people who had not listened closely, and both spent the rest of their careers refusing it. The useful difference is structural. Echo and the Bunnymen are a band with a line-up; The Cure are a songwriter with a rotating one.
You can see that in a sentence, but you can only really see it on a diagram, which is the whole reason I draw these.
Sizes and prices
Both maps are Giclée prints on 230gsm acid-free textured matte fine art paper, hand-designed without AI. A2 (594 x 420 mm, 23 x 16 in) and A1 (841 x 594 mm, 33 x 23 in), with 24 x 18 in and 36 x 24 in equivalents for buyers in the USA. Unframed from £42, or ready to hang in a black wood frame.
Frequently asked questions
Who has more albums, The Cure or Echo and the Bunnymen?
The Cure, by one. Fourteen studio albums against thirteen, although the Bunnymen's most recent, The Stars, the Oceans and the Moon, is largely re-recordings of earlier songs with two new tracks.
Which band has had more line-up changes?
The Cure, by a wide margin. Robert Smith is the only musician credited on all fourteen albums. Echo and the Bunnymen kept the same three or four names across most of the 1980s.
What is not on either map?
Live albums, compilations and soundtracks. Both maps plot studio records only, which is an editorial rule I apply right across the range. So Concert and Paris are not there, and neither are the Bunnymen live records.
Do producers get a line?
Only if they are also credited playing something. A production credit on its own does not put anybody on the map, which is why some very well known names are absent.
Which map suits a fan of both bands?
They hang well as a pair, because the shapes are so different. If it has to be one, pick the band whose line-up they can name, since that is the map they will read for longest.