The Cure – ‘Songs Of A Lost World’: a masterful reflection on loss

11 October, 2024

The Cure's Robert Smith, 2024. Credit: Sam Rockman

“This is the end of every song that we sing,” mourns Robert Smith on ‘Alone’, the opening track and launch single of The Cure’s long-mooted first album in 16 years. A radio-alienating, sprawling and cinematic seven-minute gut-punch, ‘Lovecats’ it ain’t – but it speaks to the heart of ‘Songs Of A Lost World’. Inspired by Ernest Dowson’s poem Dregs, Smith said that this was the lyric that “unlocked the record”: one that begins with an end.

READ MORE: On the cover – Robert Smith on 40 years of The Cure

Catching up with NME at various stops along the long and winding path of making the album, Smith teased that the record would be “merciless” and “express the darker side of what I’ve experienced over the last few years”, drawing more on the sounds of goth-rock standard bearer ‘Pornography’, having lost his mother, father and brother in the latter years since 2008’s ‘4:13 Dream‘. Take a deep breath, we’re going in…

Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten recently told NME how the band’s ‘Romance’ cut ‘Favourite’ compares to the likes of ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed in feeling like both “death itself” and “the final hug” – “the saddest and happiest song possible” all at once. That bittersweetness is an art for The Cure, and you can rank ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ among gems like classics ‘Plainsong’ and ‘Pictures Of You’ as another masterfully euphoric sigh, one that sees Smith waltzing into the winter: “I know that my world has grown cold / But it really doesn’t matter if you say we’ll be together / If you say that we’ll be with me in the end”.

With “the dying of the light”, there is, of course, still some light. There are still pop hooks in the ticking clock rhythms of ‘A Fragile Thing’, as Smith measures how love is “everything” but ultimately makes peace with how there’s “nothing you can do to change the end”.

You want more gloom? ‘Warsong’ – a pummelling sludge of noise that mourns “the hope of what we might have been” – leads into ‘Drone_Nodrone’, a wailing, noir rocker with a devious earworm chorus that feels like the impish cousin of ‘One Hundred Years’, ‘Burn’ and ‘Killing An Arab’.

Then, album highlight ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ lays waste with an emotional H-bomb. “As lightning splits the sky apart, I’m whispering his name / He has to wake up,” pleads Smith. It musters everything he and the band have in the tank to breathe with that deep, dull ache that lingers when you lose someone closest to you: “Something wicked this way comes / To steal away my brother’s life.”

The 10-minute opus of ‘Endsong’ – always intended as the album closer – circles back to that full stop from the start: how we’re all ultimately dust and “left alone with nothing at the end of every song”. Merciless? Yes, but there’s always enough heart in the darkness and opulence in the sound to hold you and place these songs alongside The Cure’s finest. The frontman suggested that another two records may be arriving at some point, but ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ feels sufficient enough for the wait we’ve endured, just for being arguably the most personal album of Smith’s career. Mortality may loom, but there’s colour in the black and flowers on the grave.