When I was 5, I listened to vinyl. Mostly because my grandfather would play classical music on that format and taught me many great composers that way. I inherited a bunch of hand me downs from my brothers, which were LP audio adaptations of Disney movies and a collection of Cri Crí tales and songs. My very first vinyl, that is, one I bought with my own money, was the Paul McCartney and Rupert The Bear maxi-single for the frog chorus. I got a Smurfs album later too, but to be fair, my dad gave me half the money for it.

I abandoned the format for the simplicity of tape, and then the ease of CDs. It wasn’t until I was 18 that I went back to vinyl. My brother Carlos lend me a bunch of albums he loved. A greatest hits album from REO Speedwagon. An album by Generation X, a treasured deep cut of his. U2’s The unforgettable fire, which still is my fave album of theirs. The one album that really floored me was The Cure’s Staring at the sea. I only knew their singles, but never heard a full album of theirs, so on a fateful evening of late August of 1995, I sat down on a sofa by the Kenwood stereo, strapped the well-worn earphones my dad owned and dove into The Cure’s first collection of hits.

Experiencing such classics as Killing an Arab, Boys don’t cry, A forest, and In between days on a record was otherworldly. There’s this “silence” that isn’t there, but I felt it. It’s not the needle weaving through the groove, it’s just this weird sensation, for which I have no name, that permeates only when listening on vinyl.

10:15 Saturday Night uses that unnamed silence -which probably doesn’t exist and it’s me talking bollocks- to its advantage. The urgency of the drumsticks keeping the pace, the playful bass, dancing with itself in a dark kitchen, and the lackadaisical guitar, mumbling and cursing a night out wasted waiting for a call that never comes. Drip, drip, drip, drip. We all have been there. Perhaps more times than we want to admit.

Eerie songs like Charlotte Sometimes should clash with the peppiness of the extravagant The Caterpillar. It was this mix of emotions what really made me a fan of The Cure. Grunge was still heavy on rotation, but I think it was this particular The Cure vinyl, and the onslaught of Britpop on Mexican radio, what marked my second half of the 90s.

—Sam J. Valdés López