Songs of a Lost World Recalls The Cure at Their Most Hopeless and Straightforward

It’s true that the new Cure album is good. If you enjoy The Cure, you will enjoy it. It’s a totally fair point to make that bands which have been around for nearly 50 years do not tend to make creative work that we’re actively excited about, but they’ve done it. It’s arguably the best Cure album of the century so far, which isn’t an outrageous statement, seeing as there have only been three others. As someone whose first long-read byline for Paste, written as an intern, was about my nearly lifelong connection with Robert Smith’s band, I can confirm that I am glad this album exists. Let’s get all of that out of the way first.

To directly compare the new record, Songs of a Lost World, to another Cure album—just as a barometer of quality compared to more familiar corners of the back catalog—is to misunderstand its purpose in the band’s canon. To understand what this album means in such a celebrated and storied career, we first have to recap the 16 years between The Cure’s last album, 4:13 Dream, and this one. Much of this is plotted out in the 100-minute interview with Robert Smith recently posted on the band’s website. In short, some of these new songs have existed in some form since 2010, the band’s 40th anniversary plans in 2018 (which at one point might have included a new album) took a different direction than original expected and the onset of the pandemic completely rewired both the thematic content and logistics of releasing what became Songs of a Lost World.

The band recorded much more material (which has been teased to appear on another new Cure album) and made rigorous cuts, meaning this eight-song record—composed of material written by Smith alone—is curated to maintain one cohesive atmosphere. This, in Smith’s estimation, helped serve his mission to make the songs “mean more,” to remove all obliqueness from his typically more abstract lyricism. He also knows that the “doom and gloom” tag, which has followed his band for decades, is bound to pop back up with this particular release: “It’s just fear of death. Everything’s fear of death. Fuck me, I’m simple, aren’t I?”

If these forthcoming Cure releases are expected to call back to the sticky pop anomalies, psychedelic detours or whimsical reprieves of albums past, Songs of a Lost World recalls The Cure at their most hopeless and straightforward. Yet, it doesn’t sound so much like a culmination of the band’s entire catalog, but a maturing of that darker facet that’s revealed itself in different forms over the years.

If Robert Smith, on the brink of turning 30, made his masterpiece lined with hope’s starlit glimmer on Disintegration and howled to emerge from the drug-fueled, claustrophobic paranoia of Pornography in his early twenties, Songs of a Lost World is tired of flailing, having no time for ripping at the seams of his life’s work to look for further meaning. The shaky hand that scribbled the line “It doesn’t matter if we all die” belongs to an artist who now knows there’s never been a statement further from the truth, re-reading Ernest Dowson’s poem “Dregs” until his eyes go weak and begging loved ones to fight for his place in their life while they still can. Confronted with the deaths of multiple family members and a world crashing around him, Robert Smith can’t simply “return to form.” He’s metamorphosed into a new form that suits both our larger societal moment and his own meditations on existence. He and the band have made a better album as a result.

There are two elements which make up the quintessential Cure recording, both of which are present here. The first is expressive, sweeping instrumentals—which Perry Bamonte, Jason Cooper and Reeves Gabrels, Simon Gallup and Roger O’Donnell craft and deliver with aplomb. Opener “Alone” serves the same purpose in the context of the album as it did as the lead single, cracking open a desolate sonic sky that woodwinds skate over and layered guitars hold upright, perfectly emoting everything said explicitly in Dowson’s poem (which served as the song’s primary inspiration) before Smith even starts singing. They adapt just as perfectly to the dense, combative churn of “Drone:Nodrone” and the crushing “Warsong, “ the latter of which eschews layered guitar lines for biting solos that sound like tearing flesh.

There are moments of restraint to underpin orchestral passages, but these opulent soundscapes continue to be so central to the band’s sound, say, post-1985 because they do so much of the heavy lifting atmospherically. There’s a reason so many Cure songs withstand the weight of these sprawling introductions they’re so fond of, why our diminished attention spans still don’t seem to feel the time pass when we’re locked into the emotive swirl of sound.

The other element, of course, is what happens when the musicians no longer play alone. It’s the reason you’re never sorry to hear even those most lavish, immersive Cure intros end: the weight of the voice and the way it enters the frame. There are plenty of examples of this on Disintegration, but I think of the way Robert Smith’s voice makes its entrance halfway through “Homesick” most often—the exhausted, uncharacteristically gentle “hey, hey” he lets out to split Lol Tolhurst’s dreamy introduction down the middle, finally putting definition to all that had come before with an unconvincing-but-perfectly-delivered “just one more and I’ll walk away.”

I thought only of how bowled over I am by those few seconds of singing every time I hear them when Smith’s voice came in on “And Nothing is Forever,” entering an even more grandiose stage set by an impenetrable wave of drums, piano and strings. Set against an apocalypse of sound, Smith is insistent and parts the sea for all to hear, bending the melody just slightly so as to make the heart weep: “Promise you’ll be with me in the end / Say we’ll be together, that you won’t forget / However far away, you will remember me in time.” As anyone who has seen the band on tour over the past few years will tell you, time has barely eroded the voice which has always carried the depths of human feeling in its delivery—now only more direct in its quest for answers to some of Smith’s most plainspoken lyrics to date.

By their writer’s own account, Songs of a Lost World are exactly what the title implies: the knowledge that time is running out, mourning the slow decay of society and our systems breaking down under the pressure of greed, the fear of departing from this mortal coil without saying all there is to say. “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” Smith’s tribute to his late brother which the band debuted on their last North American tour, is the most transparent of lyrical offerings. “As lightning splits the sky apart,” Smith sings as tiny pinpricks of notes tapped on a keyboard limp alongside him slightly out of time, desperate to delay the inevitable in one of the most unambiguous verses we’ve heard from him, “I’m whispering his name / He has to wake up, love slipping away.”

Second single “A Fragile Thing” almost serves as a rebuff to “And Nothing is Forever,” and its pleas for devotion in the face of fire, with a speaker resolute in her denial of Smith’s protagonist: “‘And there’s nothing you can do to change it back,’ she said / ‘Nothing you can do but sing, ‘This love is a fragile thing,’ / Nothing you can do now but pretend again.” As “Drone:Nodrone” fears that Smith is “pretty much done, staring down the barrel of the same warm gun” and closer “Endsong” repeatedly states that the hopes he held as a younger man are “all gone,” it becomes increasingly clear that we’re hearing a statement of surrender with any light sucked out of it. It doesn’t make for a particularly easy listen or for a crowd-pleasing comeback hit that a fan will tell skeptical friends to try out, but it marks the birth of a needed star in The Cure’s highly influential, much beloved galaxy. It maps out the hours, minutes, seconds of our 16 years apart, playing back the sound of surviving the death of a planet, hoping that Smith’s voice is there with us as the ground goes cold.

If you believe Smith’s claim that the band will cease to exist after its 50th anniversary, giving The Cure about four years’ time to release however much more material they supposedly to have ready to go, Songs of a Lost World will be an album we’ll have to re-contextualize a few times over. If this forthcoming material does, in fact, feel more aligned with the band’s more bizarre or sugary oddities that they’ve sprinkled throughout their career, it will make Songs of a Lost World sound even more uniformly “doom and gloom” by comparison—which may be for the better. So much of The Cure’s allure over the years has been the way the band distills that anxiety, that terror, that fear. Sure, sometimes more ears come to listen to their missives when they’ve found a more whimsical, populist way to say it, but it feels like a final word on the acceptance of that emotional state, if not the final word on the project. It’s the vow to slog through a life without those who made it worthwhile for you because you’re terrified of losing your own, and there’s something noble in it arriving now.

Then again, Robert Smith has famously threatened to blow the band up whenever he wraps up a Cure project, so we may all be prepping for the next few years of goodbyes in vain. Yet, there will never be a time when a song centering his voice won’t be welcome—all worth it for an avalanche of guitars clearing the aisles for that voice to sing, “Promise you’ll be with me in the end.” The words may not be comforting, but with our hands on Songs of a Lost World after so much time away, you’ve never been more glad it’s him saying them.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.