The Cure bandleader and vocalist Robert Smith has been talking about a new album for years. Was Songs Of A Lost World worth the wait? Photo / Universal Music
The Cure bandleader and vocalist Robert Smith has been talking about a new album for years. Was Songs Of A Lost World worth the wait? Photo / Universal Music
OPINION
It’s been 16 years since the influential band released a new album. Was it worth the wait?
As a Cure fan, you want to believe. You want to believe that a new album from the group won’t just be good. Or, even great. You want to believe that itwill be so much more than that. You need it to be more than that.
As a Cure fan, you want to believe. You want to believe that a new album will be meaningful in ways albums from other groups just aren’t.
To be a Cure fan is to wish for impossible things. To be a Cure fan is to have lived with disappointment since 1996. As a Cure fan, you wanted to believe that 1996′s Wild Mood Swings wasn’t utterly haphazard, that 2000′s Bloodflowers wasn’t desperate to be important, that 2004′s The Cure wasn’t borderline unlistenable or that 2008′s 4:13 Dream wasn’t so inconsequential. As a Cure fan, you knew in your breaking heart that they were.
Sure, you could find moments buried in each that offered a sliver of hope, like a life preserver tossed into a black ocean. But mostly, your belief drowned in the dark. As a Cure fan, you want to believe. But how many times can you live the lemon lies of a new album? The build-up. The excitement. The hope.
The reality.
It feels like a hundred years since the release of 4:13 Dream. It’s been 16. During this lifetime, bandleader and vocalist Robert Smith has talked a lot about a new album – for a while, it was albums – but none ever materialised. As a Cure fan, this was acceptable. Nothing is better than more disappointment. So why not reach for the classics and pop and fizz or wallow and mope with the best? As a Cure fan, you want to believe in their new record Songs from a Lost World, even while evidence from the last 30 years suggests you shouldn’t.
Songs of a Lost World is released today. You better believe the album has been worth the wait.
It’s been 16 years since The Cure released a new album; Songs Of A Lost World is finally out November 1. Photo / Universal Music
It crushes 32 years of disillusionment under a weight that’s as heavy and monumental as the granite sculpture on its black and grey cover. In the album’s funeral majesty, there is an urgency and belief that has been missing since Wish. A spark of life among its eight emotionally intense and powerful songs about grief and loss and ageing and death.
The record’s thundering drums, hypnotic basslines, melancholic or squealing guitars and lush all-encompassing synthesisers march steadily towards the inevitable while Smith’s unmistakable vocals resist. He’s kicking and thrashing against time itself with a resigned acceptance of the futility of that task. “This is the end,” he sighs on the grand dirge of the album’s seven-minute opener Alone. “Hopes and dreams are gone”.
On 1982′s Pornography he sneered, “It doesn’t matter if we all die,” over an oppressive armageddon and meant it. That was 42 years ago. Now, he wails, “Where did it go?”, while being suffocated under thick, heavy blankets of gorgeously dense synth strings that are punctured by pounding drums and pulled apart by menacing bass as guitars cry over the time’s passing. You can hear that he means it. At 65, Smith’s existential dread has given way to his looming mortality.
In the album’s sombre beauty, there is no Friday I’m in Love or Lovesong to light the way. The closest is the pacy, aggressive scuzz of Drone: Nodrone, a squalling, feedback-drenched fit that’s more Never Enough than The Lovecats. It won’t satisfy fans of The Cure’s giddier moments and the dim light it offers is fleeting, as it’s immediately followed by I Can Never Say Goodbye, Smith’s mournful farewell to his brother.
The cold hand of death is always close by. It’s in the warm sway of And Nothing is Forever, an incredibly beautiful tearjerker about a deathly pledge. The emotion builds for almost seven heartfelt minutes, culminating with Smith’s entreat, “Promise you’ll be with me in the end”.
And it’s right in front of him, beckoning him ever closer, on the album’s brilliantly bleak and intense 11-minute closer Endsong, which sees a broken Smith wailing, “It’s all gone/ Nothing left of what I love,” over punishing drum tom rhythms and a majestically murky cacophony of stately synths, ferocious guitar licks and a hypnotic pulsing bassline.
The album references the greats, you’ll spot splashes of Disintegration, Wish, and Pornography throughout, but it conjures its own dark beauty. A cruel irony that Smith’s closeness to death – not just his own, he lost both parents and his brother while making the album – has given so much life to his music. Maybe it was a sincerity that was missing from those 90s/00s albums?
As a Cure fan, you want to believe. In Songs of a Lost World, you finally can.
The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World is released November 1.
