The words “long awaited” don’t begin to do justice to the new Cure album. Songs of a Lost World is an album that’s been promised, rumored, dangled, teased, longed for, despaired of, imagined. Cure fans have spent 16 years lighting candles and praying for this one, as Robert Smith has kept swearing he’s thiiiiiis close to being finished. The new tunes blew everyone away on the Cure’s marathon world tour, in 33 countries, with nobody complaining the material needed work. Yet he’s kept fine-tuning in the studio, promising the results would be worth it.
He wasn’t lying. Songs of a Lost World is the triumphant power-doom epic it needed to be, fully the Cure’s best since Disintegration, as Smith reaches into the depths of his cobwebbed heart, going deep into adult loss and grief. It’s an album that begins with the line “This is the end of every song I sing,” and closes with “Left alone with nothing at the end of every song.” In between, he gets dark.
Lost World is Smith at his most emotionally turbulent, made while he was mourning the deaths of his mother, father, and brother. You might expect an album worked on for this long to sound fussy, yet it’s a vividly propulsive space-rock goth elegy, eight songs in fifty minutes, kicking with a full-blooded band attack. The 7-minute tour de force “Alone” starts it off, as it did every night of the tour, amid massive synths and dramatic drum crashes. Smith looks around at the wreckage, haunted by “the ghosts of all we’ve been.”
Lost World has a narrative flow, from “Alone” to “Endsong” — no pop detours, no wispy interludes. Smith wrote and arranged it all, producing and mixing in Wales with Paul Corkett, who also co-produced 2000’s Bloodflowers (and engineered the 1996 Wild Mood Swings). It’s the teen-nightmare noir-scapes of Pornography and Disintegration, but updated into visions of growing older, recovering from loss, watching your dreams collapse over the years — the imaginary boy turned reality-battered man.
Twenty years ago, when they made their 2004 self-titled gem, they were a postpunk guitar band, stingy on keyboards, in step with young disciples like Interpol or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But Lost World reaches beyond The Cure, Bloodflowers, or the underwhelming 2008 4:13 Dream. It’s a full-circle achievement for the goth moppet who was already singing “Yesterday I got so old” when he was halfway through his 20s.
Smith’s voice rings out stronger and angriier than you might expect, over a surprisingly pumped-up drum sound, letting it rip with his strange-as-angels yowl. As anyone who caught the tour can attest, the current Cure line-up is one filthy black-clad rock beast. MVP drummer Jason Cooper slams it home, giving up martial fanfares in “Endsong.” So does guitarist Reeves Gabrels — he was always a divisive presence in his longtime role as Bowie’s Nineties wingman, and some of us Ziggyphiles have been complaining about him since Tin Machine. But he was born to be in the Cure, elevating each tune with his flashy histrionics. Also prominent are keyboardist Roger O’Donnell and O.G. bassist Simon Gallup.
The centerpiece is Smith’s farewell to his brother, “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” with an 8-note piano motif reverberating as he laments, “Something wicked this way comes/To steal away my brother’s life.” “And Nothing Is Forever” and “A Fragile Thing” are tormented love songs, with pleas to hang on (“promise you’ll be with me in the end”) over the bittersweet synths. “Warsong” builds from a harmonium-driven drone into a full-blown meltdown, warning, “All we will ever know is bitter ends.” It all crashes into “Endsong,” the 10-minute finale, as he finds himself “Wondering about that boy and the world he called his own/And I’m outside in the dark, wondering how I got so old.”
Lost World might be one of the most agonizingly delayed rock albums in history, crafted with Smith’s usual “you think you’re tired now but wait until 2024” disregard for deadlines. You might even wonder if Smith delayed it an extra year just so he could top Axl for bragging rights over taking even longer than Chinese Democracy. But from now on, it’s just the new Cure album, topping expectations to the point where it recalibrates their whole story. He’s mourning for his lost world. But this is one of the most beguiling music worlds he’s ever created — the sound of Robert Smith raging against the darkness and refusing to quit.
