Album Review: The Cure, ‘Songs of a Lost World’

Robert Smith couldn’t possibly offer a different ending. The last song on Songs of a Lost World, the Cure‘s marvelous first album in 16 years, sprawls cinematically over 10 minutes, brimming with luscious synths before Smith finally sighs, “It’s all gone/ Left alone with nothing/ The end of every song.” Yet his resignation arrives as nothing if not a foregone conclusion. The opening track ‘Alone’, the one that “unlocked the record” for Smith, begins with the line “This is the end of every song I sing,” and the sequencing seems to have been firm in place for a long time; they’ve been bookending their live sets the same way since first introducing those songs on tour in 2022. ‘Dregs’, a poem by the decadent poet Ernest Dowson that ‘Alone’ was inspired by and directly echoes, does provide some useful context: “And health and hope have gone the way of love/ Into the drear oblivion of lost things.” This is the world Songs plunges headfirst into, where oblivion isn’t just an inevitability but the starting point, the throughline, and above all, a container for everything that cannot be restored in the mortal realm. The preposition matters here: not for, or in, but of a Lost World.

It’s tempting, given the current state of the world and the news that looms over the week following the album’s release, to lean into the apocalyptic connotations of its title. But as a writer who was around both in 2016 and through the COVID years, I’m especially wary of taking this review in that direction. Besides, despite the doomful opening image of birds falling out of the sky, Songs of a Lost World hones in on some of the most strikingly personal lyrics of Smith’s career. He wrote and arranged the whole album, producing and mixing it in Wales with Paul Corkett, while grappling with the death of his mother, father, and older brother – all of whom he lost since the Cure’s last album, 4:13 Dream. ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ is a foreboding dramatization of the night his older brother, Richard, passed away in 2019; at the risk of wringing the words dry, Smith keeps the verses simple, leaving in one literary couplet – “Something wicked this way comes/ To steal away my brother’s life” – for its ghostly, evocative power.

For all their overriding sense of gloom, ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ and ‘A Fragile Thing’ work on an intimate level, too, almost conversational. They also both reverse the implications of their titles: the regal ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ doesn’t romanticize the end so much as beautify the promise to be with someone on their deathbed, while the latter, sounding visceral and prickly, reveres love above all else yet falls into the grip of impermanence: “Nothing you can do to change the end.” The album repeatedly beats down the same refrain, but not always in the form of a sigh: “All we will ever know is bitter ends,” Smith spits out on ‘Warsong’, as former David Bowie sideman Reeves Gabrels (making his recorded debut with the band after being with them for more than a decade) lets his guitar wail. The similarly jagged and suddenly upbeat ‘Drone:Nodrone’ finds Smith declaring, “Yeah, I’m pretty much done.”

Placed right in the middle of the record, ‘Warsong’ and ‘Drone:Nodrone’ are its shortest songs and pack the biggest punch while introducing an element of variety. In every other way, though, Songs of a Lost World verges on being almost one-dimensional in its encroaching melancholia, which would be an issue if the Cure weren’t so good at making it feel like a dimension worth getting lost in – so opulent, elegant, and downright epic in its presentation, from Jason Cooper’s relentlessly thunderous drums to the warm cloud of synths enveloping Smith’s voice on ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’. Most bands of their stature would attempt to return revitalized, but the Cure have no reason to mask their despondency, which is the very thing that guides the album’s typically glacial pacing. “My weary dance with age/ And resignation moves me slow,” Smith sings on ‘All I Ever Am’, “Toward a dark and empty stage/ Where I can sing the world I know.” Unlike similarly pensive entries in their catalog, Songs notably shows no interest in disrupting the pervasive atmosphere with a veneer of pop fantasy; ‘Drone:Nodrone’ comes closest, but it’s still more desperate than catchy. It’s precisely this towering yet oddly approachable density that ultimately makes the album stand apart, even if you have to meet it where it’s at: there’s no hooks and no filler.

So you may argue about it being the best since whichever album you hold as the Cure’s previous high watermark, but it might be the most immersive since before then. Robert Smith couldn’t offer a different ending, a way out of all this death and mourning, but that didn’t stop him from delivering the album that would both satisfy fans and make sense of those themes in the realest, most tangible way he probably ever has. It would be a fitting final statement, but Smith has already talked about having two more Cure albums on the way. I wonder if and how they mayexpand beyond the world I know; whether this record carves out space for fading memories and “the dying of the light” so that the follow-up can imagine someplace new. Or the story and the world remain largely unchanged, as they tend to do, and the Cure just make another miraculous record out of it.