We study the stochastic cubic nonlinear wave equation (SNLW) with an additive noise on the three-dimensional torus {mathbb {T}}^3. In particular, we prove local well-posedness of the (renormalized) SNLW when the noise is almost a space-time white noise. In recent years, the paracontrolled calculus has played a crucial role in the well-posedness study of singular SNLW on {mathbb {T}}^3 by Gubinelli et al. (Paracontrolled approach to the three-dimensional stochastic nonlinear wave equation with quadratic nonlinearity, 2018, arXiv:1811.07808 [math.AP]), Oh et al. (Focusing Phi ^4_3-model with a Hartree-type nonlinearity, 2020. arXiv:2009.03251 [math.PR]), and Bringmann (Invariant Gibbs measures for the three-dimensional wave equation with a Hartree nonlinearity II: Dynamics, 2020, arXiv:2009.04616 [math.AP]). Our approach, however, does not rely on the paracontrolled calculus. We instead proceed with the second order expansion and study the resulting equation for the residual term, using multilinear dispersive smoothing.