28 years of News, rumors, minutiae about The Cure
From Robert:
TROXY ALBUM SHOW: TICKETS PRICED @ £56.61 = £50 FACE VALUE (INC £1 WARCHILD DONATION) + 8% BOOKING FEE (£4) + £1.50 RESTORATION LEVY + 2% TRANSACTION FEE (£1.11) VIA @DICEFM - NO DYNAMIC PRICING - DETAILS HERE.
From The Cure:
The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World : Album Launch Show
Live at Troxy London - 1st November 2024
Ticket info at thecure.com/troxy
Free Global Live Stream on The Cure YouTube - More details to follow
Aaron Law posted this on Twitter and Uncut retweeted it so I assume this is okay to post. If not, let me know.
Yes, there's going to be a Songs of a Lost World full album show.
From Uncut:
In the new Uncut, Smith reveals how he nearly disbanded The Cure in 2018 – but now has plans until 2029…
By Sam Richards
In the new issue of Uncut – in UK shops from today or available to order direct from us by clicking here – Robert Smith reveals how he almost disbanded The Cure upon reaching the group’s 40th anniversary in 2018.
“I thought that the Hyde Park show would be it, I thought that was the end of The Cure,” says Smith. “I didn’t plan it, but I had a sneaky feeling that this was going to be it. But it was such a great day and such a great response, I enjoyed it so much and we got
a flood of offers to headline every major European festival. ‘Do you want to play Glastonbury?’ So I thought maybe it’s not the right time to stop.
“I wasn’t stopping because I didn’t want to do it any more, I just thought it would allow me a few years when I’d still be able to do something else. I wasn’t that bothered, funnily enough. I’d arranged everything to end in 2018, so when we got to 2019, I felt relieved. ‘We did it!’ I’ve had a different outlook to everything since.
Pretty much everyone that died that meant something to me died prior to 2019, so I felt like I’ve got to make the most of it.”
Not only was this sequence of events the spur for writing much of new album Songs Of A Lost World, it prompted Smith to start looking even further ahead, to The Cure’s 50th anniversary in 2028 and beyond. “We’ll probably be playing quite regularly through until the 2028 anniversary… The last 10 years of playing shows have been the best 10 years of being in the band. It pisses all over the other 30-odd years!”
You can read much more from Robert Smith in the December 2024 issue of Uncut, in UK shops from today or available to order direct from us by clicking here.
There's a great new interview with Robert in the new issue of Uncut that's out today.
Earlier today I posted some carefully edited scans of some of the info in it, but Uncut asked me to delete them. My apologies to them for any harm caused.
Go buy a copy and find out if there's a Songs of a Lost World album show coming up. What's the plan for live shows in the next year and more. Why It Can Never be the Same isn't on the album. Why there's only 8 songs on it, and what's going to happen with all of these other songs they have written. And there's so much more.
From NME:
The Cure – ‘Songs Of A Lost World’: a masterful reflection on loss
Robert Smith and co’s first full album in 16 years deals in darkness and death, but with flowers on the grave
By Andrew Trendell
“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.
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.
From Radiowise UK:
“Alone”
We are in the era of streaming platforms and increasingly shorter songs and the Cure release a 7-minute single with 3 and a half minutes of instrumental intro: this alone gives the measure of the world in which they move.
Guitars, rhythm and synths that intertwine, then the voice that enters (“This is the end of every song that we sing”): it is the song that started the project of this album, born during Robert Smith’s nocturnal walks and from the feeling of overwhelm and disorientation that the singer always says he feels at a certain point in the night.
A song that brings the Cure back to the atmosphere of “Disintegration”, giving both the thematic and sonic tone to the album: dark, compressed, epic.
“And nothing is forever”
Piano and strings in crescendo, then the guitar, then the rhythm: another very long instrumental intro, over 3 minutes. “And nothing is forever” is one of the songs already played live in recent years: in the studio version it becomes even more powerful and emotional. Smith describes it as a song about mortality, about the promise of being at someone’s side in the most difficult moment. difficult: “Promise you’ll be with me in the end/ Say we’ll be together with no regret/For however far away” and again “And I know, I know/For my world has grown old/And nothing is forever /And I know, I know”.
“A fragile thing”
“Nothing you can do to turn it back she said/ Nothing you can do but sing/This song is a fragile thing/ This song is my everything/But nothing you can do to change the end”: “A fragile thing” is a song about the choices you make and the consequences they have on the other people around you.
It was played live for the first time in Milan two years ago: the introduction this time is short – less than a minute – and features bass and drums. While in the central part you can feel the presence of the guitar more, with beautiful embroideries (by Reeves Gabrels?) that make the song more effective than the live version.
“Warsong”
I start with a pump organ, an instrument already used in the past – as in the start of “Untitled” from “Disintegration”, one of Smith’s favorite Cure songs – then drums, guitars and various sound effects enter. The song was born from the cyclical conflicts and reconciliations that Smith says he had with a person, wondering if this is what men are made of, continuous personal wars. Just over 4 minutes, one of the shortest songs on the album.
“Drone: Nodrone”
A distorted bass, the drums; the “drone” referred to in the title is the one spotted above the singer’s house: the song, explains Smith, was born from the frustration generated by the intrusive nature and continuous surveillance of the contemporary world. This is why it is the angriest song on the album, even musically, punctuated by a piercing electric guitar that chases Smith’s voice for the entire song, 4 and a half minutes.
“I can never say goodbye”
The piano is preceded by the sound of a storm, then the drums forcefully enter, for another long 2 minute intro. The song is the mourning for the death of Robert Smith’s brother: the music was written immediately after his death while the words, he says, arrived only after some time and are the story of their last evening together: “Something wicked this way comes/To steal away my brother’s life/I could never say goodbye”. Smith says that singing this song live helped him overcome his grief: in videos of the performances he is often emotional.
“All I ever Am”
Drums and synths, then guitars, with a relatively short intro, 1 and a half minutes. Smith defines it as a song about self-acceptance, about realizing that you are a sum of multitudes, of ghosts, dreams, memories and hopes that come to define the present self.
“Endsong”
Another familiar-sounding intro of drums, synths and guitars: the record ends as it began, with a sister song to “Alone”. Here too there is a long instrumental intro that almost lasts 6 minutes, and the theme of disorientation, of feeling lost and of growing old in an increasingly complex and broken world: “And I’m outside in the dark/ Staring at the blood red moon/ Remembering the hopes and dreams I had/All I had to do/And wondering what became of that boy/And the world he called his own/And I’m outside in the dark/Wondering how I got so old”.
On the tour it closed the band’s main set, on the album it is a 10-minute masterpiece, which ends with Smith repeating “Left alone with nothing at the end of every song/Left alone with nothing” on a distorted guitar and insistent drums.
And another interesting anonymous work of art from this artist for @heartresearchuk. Third of five.
Artist: Anonymous 😉
Title: WARSONG
From The Quietus:
The Cure have unveiled a new song from much-anticipated new album Songs Of A Lost World. ‘A Fragile Thing’ is described by Robert Smith as “the ‘love song’ of the album, but it’s not really a love song in the way that ‘Lovesong’ is a love song… it’s about how Love is the most enduring of emotions, the most powerful of emotions, incredibly resilient… and yet at the same time incredibly fragile… [it] is driven by the difficulties we face in choosing between mutually exclusive needs and how we deal with the futile regret that can follow these choices, however sure we are that the right choices have been made… it can often be very hard to be the person that you really need to be.”
From the official site:
01 /ALONE
02 /AND NOTHING IS FOREVER
03 /A FRAGILE THING
04 /WARSONG
05 /DRONE:NODRONE
06 /I CAN NEVER SAY GOODBYE
07 /ALL I EVER AM
08 / ENDSONG
From HispaCure:
En plataformas (spotify, apple music...) a las 21.00 horas (España) El sencillo viene con "Video Lyric".
El single, en formato fÃsico, a la venta en noviembre, solo se podrá comprar vÃa web.
#THECURE RELEASES NEW SINGLE "A FRAGILE THING" TODAY (09.10)
On platforms (spotify, apple music...) at 9:00 p.m. (Spain) The single comes with a "Lyric Video".
The single, in physical format, on sale in November, can only be purchased online.
From Uncut magazine:
Whatever’s ailing you, we’ve got The Cure! Robert Smith opens up about Songs Of A Lost World and much more in the new issue of Uncut, in shops on Friday or available for pre-order now: bit.ly/UncutDec2024
Includes a FREE 14-track CD curated by Kim Deal!
