The Cure have long dwelled in a kind of rarefied artistic blue zone in which the years pile up but the end of the band is serenely defied – maybe due to a diet rich in red wine, combined with a dogged aversion to modernity. Band leader Robert Smith does not own a smartphone; the band’s consumption of polyphenols in the 1980s was legendary.
Having crested the Cure’s jubilant 40th anniversary in 2018, Smith swiftly announced a new album for release in 2019. Cure songs often tend to take a little while to warm up – the introduction to Alone, the opening track of Songs of a Lost World, clocks in at six minutes; three minutes elapse before Smith draws breath to sing. Likewise, a mere five years on from that announcement (including two years of generous, fan-pleasing gigs), the first new Cure album since 2008 has finally been deemed ready to drop.
At a succinct eight tracks and a downright sprightly 49-minute run time, it’s a thunderous statement on grief, anomie and regret – and the passage of time, a specialist subject. What you might call “the drear oblivion of lost things”, according to the Victorian poet Ernest Dowson – whose Dregs became the jumping-off point for Alone – is a major focus.
All, pretty much, is lost: youth, loved ones, the familiar. The album’s cover does away with the squiggly artwork long favoured by the band, to be replaced by a lump of half-formed granite: Bagatelle, a 1975 work by Janez Pirnat, redolent of a damaged classical sculpture rescued from beneath the waves. Its grey tones recall the cover of Faith, the band’s dolorous epic from 1981.
Throughout their history, the Cure have very often bucked the gothic thumbnail sketch of their output by rotating through crisp post-punk (the early years), romantic whimsy (the pop songs) and wild psychedelic disarray (Pornography). Existential melancholy is, though, their calling card bar none. And Songs of a Lost World delivers resonantly on the first part of Smith’s promise of a triptych of new material: one album that’s “very, very doom and gloom”, one that “isn’t”, and a solo work of “noise”.
This is a record that dolefully eats its own tail, an ouroboros of bleak finality that begins with Alone (“this is the end of every song that we sing… we toast, with bitter dregs, to our emptiness”) and concludes with the stately, remorseless Endsong (“It’s all gone, it’s all gone, it’s all gone, left alone with nothing, at the end of every song”). The latter’s lead guitar part feels like an acidic paean to the foolishness of strutting and fretting even a minute upon the stage, much like Hendrix upended The Star-Spangled Banner into a rebuttal of the Vietnam war.
Both of these bookends benefit from the emphatic pummel of Jason Cooper’s drum kit, driving home the message of inexorability. These tracks were written in response to a spate of losses among Smith’s family and friends pre-pandemic, but encompass the sucker punch of 2020-21 too; birds fall from the sky, nodding to the climate crisis. The most direct track is I Can Never Say Goodbye, marking the passing of Richard, the music-savvy elder brother looked up to by the young Smith. And Nothing Is Forever – laden with piano and strings – deals with his deep regret at having made a promise to be with someone on their deathbed, one he could not keep. Another theme eats caustically away at many of these songs: the question of Smith’s own selfhood. It seems to be fracturing, even as every music fan has a pretty solid idea of who this monumental figure is.
The stage is set for Songs of a Lost World to be lugubrious and overwrought from end to end. Wisely, Smith opts to spike his pain with bitterness and paranoia too. Warsong musters the sour hum of organ to deal with an intractable conflict: two people locked in enmity for ever.
The record’s crowning glory, though, is its unexpected pop banger, Drone: Nodrone, a pacier, snarkier cut about self-doubt prompted by the arrival of a drone above Smith’s garden. In the lyrics, he is initially full of caustic bewilderment; his centre is not holding. But soon we’re back on message, into the record’s unified thematic groove, with Smith “staring down the barrel of the same warm gun”. The direction of travel is – yes – “down, down, down”. But here, Smith and the rest of the Cure are full of fight and electricity, with melodies to spare. Bring on the next two records.
