Greatest-hits retrospectives from bands who are very much still in the thick of their recording careers are often ominous signs. Even if they weren’t hastily culled in order to fulfill a contractual obligation, they can signal the flagging of a group’s creative energies as the members cash in before an impending commercial nosedive and a quiet break-up.

And when it comes to the Cure — a band whom leader Robert Smith has been hinting at breaking up for almost a decade now — it’s hard not to see the new Greatest Hits (Elektra) as a signal that he may finally be through with the moniker that’s seen him through close to three decades. Especially since this is the third official Cure collection — following Staring at the Sea in 1986 and Galore in 1997 (both on Elektra) — and it marks the end of the band’s contract with their long-time label. The future of the Cure would seem to be mired in the same gray murk as Smith’s miserable masterpieces Disintegration and The Head on the Door.

Not that Greatest Hits conjures much of that bleakness itself. Despite the presence of brooding moments like "A Forest" and "Boys Don’t Cry," the album is heavy on tracks that reveal the playful, sensual, silly side of the band. Even the two new songs, "Cut Here" and "Just Say Yes," have a fizzy exuberance, and the latter is a veritable dance-floor romp.

What’s more, in conversation the bed-headed majordomo appears devoid of the mope-rock image for which the band are known in alternative circles. Although it’s evident that their lack of a label places them at a career crossroads, he clearly doesn’t consider this a fatal development. "It pleases me," he remarks about the first musical independence he’s had since age 19. "I’m determined to enjoy some kind of creative freedom because I think particularly with the Internet, it’s at that point now where there are some great opportunities. I fear that it’s going to be closed down very rapidly; there are teams of lawyers working, trying to close down people’s options. So I thought I’d just have a brief taste of freedom before they cut the entire thing."

Although Smith refers to distributing his future musical output over the Internet merely as "one option," he seems eager to test the waters with tracks from his long-rumored solo album, for which he has the basics for 10 songs recorded. Originally he saw his own work as a separate project; now he says that there isn’t "that clear line" between his solo and Cure music. "There will be a mixture of vocal and instrumental tracks," he reveals of the still-untitled set, on which current Cure bassist Simon Gallup and drummer Jason Cooper play. "Some of them to me just work better as instrumentals. I toyed with the idea of having guest singers, but then I kind of thought that was pretty stupid really. Not just to end up having guest singers, but to have a solo album where everyone else sings except for me would be conceptually a step too far."

Smith emphasizes that the solo album isn’t meant to signal any major internal rifts in the Cure. For one thing, another proper Cure album is, as he puts it, "half-written." And the first copies of Greatest Hits include a limited-edition bonus disc with acoustic renderings to parallel Greatest Hits’ plugged-in originals. Sounding spontaneous, loose and fresh, these new recordings bespeak a band having tremendous amounts of fun.

"We were just sitting around, thinking, ‘Cure fans will probably buy this hits album because it’s got the couple new songs.’ That’s the marketing man’s idea. But we were thinking, ‘We’ve got to counteract that somehow.’ So the acoustic idea came out of that conversation. We allowed ourselves two takes of each song. That’s it. It was quite tense, there was kind of an underlying hysteria to the sessions, because we didn’t really know if we knew some of the songs!"

Smith has always left plenty of room for the Cure to grow, as the "unplugged" experiment attests. "The band to me has never been about just going through the motions. That’s why we’ve done less and less over the years, so that it remains something special and exciting. If I just kept kind of banging on, it would have lost its attraction and I probably would have burned out and just given up. I actually write more music now than I ever have done, but the actual performing side and the group going out there and doing something, I’d like to keep it . . . so there’s a real sense of anticipation, for the band as much as for the audience."