The long-promised, highly-anticipated album, Songs of a Lost World by legendary Gothic rockers the Cure, has finally arrived, their first studio album since 2008’s 4:13 Dream. It took 16 years for them to release new studio material, but what’s a decade-and-a-half between friends? A few weeks ago, the Cure unleashed a new single, “Alone”, and they released another, “A Fragile Thing”, the following week. Their promo team also continued to release tiny teasers of other songs. Unlike 4:13 Dream, which featured the more Cubist elements of the Cure, showcasing as it did their multiple stylistic angles and genre-jumping tendencies, Songs of a Lost World is a cohesive collection that skews toward the darker end of the spectrum.
It’s true that “existential despair” is a tired term that fans and critics append in abundance to their critiques of the Cure. I am sure I have also done it, as I prefer the Cure’s darkest material. The bleaker the songs, the better, in my view. Forget the doomy sounds of death metal – those sounds are cartoonish compared to the hollow agonies emitting from the Cure’s blackest collection of songs on 1982’s Pornography. Yet, there is a metaphysical majesty to the songs on Pornography, too, imbued as they are with a desolate beauty.
Songs of a Lost World is arguably the Cure’s darkest album since Pornography. Sure, there was the sprawling sadness of 1989’s Disintegration and the more mature melancholy of 2000’s Bloodflowers, but the tunes on Songs of a Lost World hit differently. Could it be because, in the intervening years, singer and lyricist Robert Smith experienced unimaginable loss with the death of his beloved brother, who introduced him to the music that became the catalyst for his storied career? Or the pandemic-era demise of his aunts and uncles? Or the slipping away of his parents, whom he cherished and helped incubate his musical dreams?
After all, Smith is 65, but he was barely 23 when he made Pornography. Pornography is the sound of a youthful torment, a naively cynical soul anticipating an amorphous, abstract apocalypse. Meanwhile, Songs of a Lost World is the sound of a fully realized human being on the edge of the actual abyss. Just listen to “Endsong”.
Five years ago, when the tracks on Songs of a Lost World were in various completion stages, Smith said the record would be one of “unrelenting darkness”. It may be one of the few times we can hold Smith to his word; he’s not always one to live up to his promises. But in this case, “unrelenting darkness” might be an apt description – and yet, at the urging of others in the band and even his wife, there are moments of relief, so the record has subtle sonic gradations. It’s not suffocatingly monochromatic, but it’s also not an exercise in Taoist light/dark dichotomy. Shadows of varying shades suffuse all corners.
Just take the opener, “Alone,” a majestically moody ode to emptiness. During “Alone’s” swelling and swaying seven minutes, an extended introduction allows it to unfurl languidly and elegantly before Smith’s pristinely plaintive vocals appear. Chiming guitar intertwines with mournful, ethereal synths, stately drums, and distorted bass, leading fluidly into Smith’s signature warped warble – a boyish yet otherworldly howl – offering us a chilling serenade as he laments loss and the tragic truth that all things must end: “It all stops / We were always sure that we would never change.” According to Smith, “Alone” is the key that unlocked the album.
The cosmically clashing closer, “Endsong”, is a mini-soundtrack for cosmic collapse; the song to play as the world whirls for an empty eternity. While Smith would hate a Doors comparison since he professes to dislike Jim Morrison’s band, “Endsong” IS the Cure’s “The End,” only longer and much darker. It’s spine-chillingly bleak but in the most gorgeous way possible. The Cure have always sculpted beauty out of terror, which is what marks them as distinctive.
Swirling and psychedelic, owing a considerable debt to Smith’s guitar hero Jimi Hendrix, “Endsong”, in all its baroque austerity, is a statement of acceptance, a manifesto embracing mortality to the fullest, upon a momentary meditation: “And I’m outside in the dark / Wondering how I got so old.” As the track heads toward the 11-minute mark, cultivating a mystically oppressive atmosphere, with elegantly primal patterns courtesy of Jason Cooper’s drumming and guitarist Reeves Gabrels exerting his best arty “wah-wah” effects, Robert howls, “It’s all gone, it’s all gone.”
Lost world, indeed. Between the devastating bookends of the lush, immersive “Alone” and the epic goth-prog of “Endsong”, we have a narrow spectrum of sounds and moods. The pace is plodding, but as mentioned, some mildly uptempo respites might be jolting on the first listen but more fluidly integrated into the LP upon successive listens. These more rock-oriented tunes even add some coarser textures to the otherwise smooth proceedings, as Songs of a Lost World is primarily rife with songs awash in shimmering synths.
For example, “A Fragile Thing” has some levity, if you can call it that. In this song, we hear a disquieting John Carpenter-esque piano and Simon Gallup’s abrasive bass, while a yearning guitar is counterpointed with a slightly jazzy beat and chorus. It’s all in service to a resigned musing about love’s brittleness.
Other “anomalies” include “Warsong” and its cacophonous reckoning with the futility of fighting, “Drone: Nodrone’s” industrialized funk commenting on the intrusive devices of modernity, and the invigoratingly infectious “All I Ever Am”, a labyrinthian exploration of self as shaped by trial and time. These songs add variations on the lost world theme; the death of relationships, the death of personal privacy, and the death of a solid sense of self also erode our worlds, leading us to a sense of hopelessness and loss.
Physical death remains the thematic pivot. “And Nothing Lasts Forever” is a delicate serenade to a loved one, promising to be there when death approaches. “I Can Never Say Goodbye” is an exquisitely visceral gut punch—a direct narration of the events surrounding Robert’s brother’s death.
Songs of a Lost World is agonizingly personal. Yet, in that idiosyncratic way unique to the Cure, the tracks also carry universal import. There is a sense of almost indulgent angst, giving us permission to luxuriate in our collective inextricable misery. Implicit in the most anguishing songs is the idea that there is a paradoxical resplendency to tragedy. After all, much of the Cure’s audience has grown up alongside Smith and the boys, and just as he reflected their adolescent turmoils in earlier records, he is now refracting their middle-aged traumas, which are vastly more “real” in many respects. Aging ain’t for the faint of heart, but somehow, we can find purpose, even joy, in our timeless transience.
So while Songs of a Lost World could be paired with fan-favorite Faith for some of the spacier soundscapes and the aforementioned Pornography for its brutal beauty, it’s the symphonic sprawls of Disintegration and Bloodflowers, with their covert and overt ruminations on aging, that Songs of a Lost World seems to be most akin to. Smith has often been quoted as having trepidation at turning 30 (Disintegration) and then 40 (Bloodflowers). In the latest promotional interview with the record label, he expresses mild shock at being 65 and even attempts to lay out a five-year plan for the Cure, wherein at the band’s 50th anniversary, the musicians retire for good. Of course, the mercurial, age-obsessed Robert Smith has been threatening retirement since he was 20, so it could very well be that the Cure lasts indefinitely, even if that means he would be singing from beyond the grave.
This is the exclamatory point of Songs of a Lost World: We live in death’s shadow. For many of us, it’s genuinely time to face the music, in which case we have a grouping of eight gorgeously grim and grandiose songs to accompany our begrudging acceptance that we, too, will shuffle off these mortal coils.
Songs of a Lost World has a naked rawness that can be hard to listen to at times, but somehow, the music wrapped around the sorrowful sentiments makes it not just bearable but transcendently enjoyable. The songs of this particular lost world are introspective yet relatable, dark yet rousing. These are cinematic elegies for the times. So how can Songs of a Lost World be characterized without resorting to “existential despair” cliches? You can’t. As Robert Smith rages at the dying of the light amid the sonic thunder, we are indeed “left alone with nothing, at the end of every song”.