Thursday, October 31, 2024
Troxy soundcheck
So while we were all listening to the Radio 2 concert, The Cure were doing a soundcheck at Troxy for tomorrow night's show:
Just Like Heaven, Warsong, Drone: NoDrone, A Fragile Thing, Secrets, M, Play For Today, Fascination Street, Alone, And Nothing Is Forever, A Fragile Thing, Warsong, Endsong.
Thanks, @liqueurband!
6 Music session & Radio 2 video is up
For everyone in the UK, and anyone with a VPN that works with iPlayer, video of The Cure's BBC 6 Music session is up. In black and white at Robert's request.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0jzvv4n/6-music-session-the-cure-live
And here's the Radio 2 video.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0jzxdqn/radio-2-in-concert-the-cure
More Lost World reviews
So many reviews now, will just link to them, so everything else doesn't get buried.
Lost World review from The Washington Post
From The Washington Post:
New album from the Cure is the band’s best since ‘Disintegration’
“Songs of a Lost World,” the first new album in 16 years from Robert Smith and company, is the apotheosis of a career-long fascination with disintegration.
Review by Chris Kelly
Ever since the release of 2008’s “4:13 Dream,” the Cure has spent all its time performing onstage and trawling through its own archives. Along with a relentless concert schedule, there have been remixes and live recordings and retrospective releases — but no new album.
All those years of dimly lit doom and gloom seemingly made the light of day too much to bear, as if pondering what was next was too much. But after 16 years without an album of new material, the Cure is back with “Songs of a Lost World,” a work of goth grandeur that gazes into the existential void and ponders the end of not just the band, but everything.
For decades, the Cure has oscillated between its poppier aspirations and the downcast goth rock that it helped establish in the ’80s. “Songs of a Lost World” leans fully into the darkness with wall-of-sound production that demonstrates the ouroboros of influence: Cure descendants like My Bloody Valentine and Nine Inch Nails loom large in the mental mix.
The album is awash waves of wiry guitar riffs, warm synth pads, the echoes of familiar piano chords and — as if evoking the sounds of an earlier, analogue era — the sludginess of melted vinyl and a finger pushing down on cassette tape. “Songs of a Lost World” is an album for meditation under black light.
It is also patient. Half of its songs are longer than six minutes, with one topping 10, and it takes nearly three minutes for front man Robert Smith to set the album’s tone with its first lyric: “This is the end of every song that we sing.”
Smith — who is the only credited songwriter on a Cure album for the first time since 1985’s “The Head on the Door” — is 65 years old and has been in the band for nearly five decades. For any artist at his age, pondering the end would be natural; for a gothic bard like Smith, “Songs of a Lost World” is the apotheosis of a career-long fascination with disintegration.
Amid the “blood red moons” and “cold black rain” of Smith’s haunted poetry are solemn soliloquies about the time, memory and dreams that make up a person, and what happens when the stars grow dim and a “broken-voiced lament” calls us home. Even years spent morbidly fixated has not prepared him for what’s next. “I’m trying to make some sense of it,” he admits. “I can’t anymore, if I ever really could.” (Sorry, young goths: It Doesn’t Get Better.)
Smith’s lyrical focus and baroque songcraft make “Songs of a Lost World” the band’s best album since its 1989 masterpiece “Disintegration” (even if listeners seeking a “Lovesong” or “Pictures of You” will be left wanting). And despite Smith teasing at least one more album, it would also be a fitting end point for the Cure. After a half century of searching in the shadows for answers about love, life and death, Smith has seemingly found what he was looking for … whether that provides any solace or not.
“I’m outside in the dark, wondering how I got so old,” he sings on the appropriately titled closer, “Endsong.” “No, I don’t belong here anymore.”
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
BBC Radio 2 concert setlist (Oct. 30th, 2024)
Alone, Pictures of You, A Fragile Thing, High, A Night Like This, Lovesong, The Walk, Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, Endsong
Encore: Lullaby, Friday I'm in Love, Close to Me, Why Can't I Be You?
Thanks again, Andy!
All I Ever Am clip
Clip of All I Ever Am is up on the Lost World site.
https://www.songsofalost.world/
BBC Radio 6 Session setlist (Oct. 30th, 2024)
Plainsong, Last Dance (stopped, then restarted), I Can Never Say Goodbye, Burn, And Nothing Is Forever, At Night, A Forest, All I Ever Am, Prayers for Rain, Disintegration
To those asking, Perry is still with them and Roger is back and looking really well. 🙏
Andy says it's really weird with an applause ban at this show.
From Andy:
"To those asking. Approx 75 mins for 10 songs. Met Simon and Eden backstage before being thrown out. But there was a table full of albums down there signed by the whole band. "
Thanks, Andy!
Premature Evaluation: Songs Of A Lost World
From Stereogum:
Premature Evaluation: The Cure Songs Of A Lost World
By Tom Breihan
Let’s not go overboard. It’s so tempting! You want to go overboard in a situation like this! A great legacy act returns with its first album in a long time, one that explicitly calls back to thing things that made the group so beloved in the first place? That’s what we want! Given our reunion-friendly touring climate, it’s something that happens more often than you might expect! When it happens, fans and critics have a tendency to get too excited, to praise the new record in ways that almost diminish the old ones. It’s a shortcut to living in the past, insisting that yesterday’s trailblazers are superior to today’s. It’s the line of thinking that leads Time Out Of Mind to defeat OK Computer, both at the Grammys and on the 1997 Pazz & Jop poll. So let’s not do that to the Cure. Let’s take a breath.
OK. We’re breathing. We’re putting everything in perspective. We’re keeping our expectations reasonable. Songs Of A Lost World is the Cure’s first new album in 16 years, and their last one, 2008’s 4:13 Dream, was nobody’s favorite. The last time the Cure were a truly vital and relevant force in music, popular or otherwise, was probably 1992, when they dropped Wish. That was 32 years ago. There’s a very good chance that you, the person reading this review, were not yet born when that happened. The Cure released four more studio LPs after Wish, and they all have their adherents, but few would argue that they’re up there with the band’s best. For half that time, the Cure have been quiet, though they’re continued to put on dizzying live shows and to say warm and reasonable things in interviews. The goodwill is through the roof. The world wants a great Cure record. The world wants the new Cure record to be great.
Well, the Cure made a great new record. In the interest of not going overboard, I will say that Songs Of A Lost World is the most monochromatic type of great Cure record. Over the band’s long, twisty history, they’ve built an image — the miserablists with the teased hair and the makeup — and they’ve also undermined that image at every turn. The Cure’s catalog is full of zippy pop bangers, explosive left-field sunbursts, and all-out rockers. The gauzy desperation of an album like Disintegration works so beautifully because you never know when a snatch-your-breath pop song like “Pictures Of You” will emerge out of the murk. Songs Of A Lost World doesn’t work that way. It’s all murk. If you’re arguing that it’s the Cure’s best since Disintegration, you need to show your work.
But how about the best since Bloodflowers? In the lead-up to the Cure’s 2000 album, Robert Smith talked a lot about how it was his most satisfying artistic experience in years and how the record was supposed to be a third entry in a trilogy with Pornography and Disintegration. It’s not that. Bloodflowers is long and ponderous, and it doesn’t have melodies that can stick in your head. But have you listened to Bloodflowers lately? It’s awesome — upon revisiting, way better than I remembered. Bloodflowers presents a total immersive sonic environment, a deep dive into the heaviest parts of the Cure. Songs Of A Lost World works in much the same way, and it might be even better. Don’t go into Songs Of A Lost World expecting anything on the level of Disintegration. Keep the Bloodflowers precedent in mind. Judged on that basis — or even just on its own, as a self-contained piece of music — Songs Of A Lost World is amazing.
With all caveats out of the way, it is absolutely ridiculous that a new Cure album could be as good as this one. After the brickwalled ’00s radio-rock slickness of the last two Cure albums, the production on Songs Of A Lost World is deep and soft and velvety. The guitars leave traces in the air. The keyboards shimmer. Robert Smith is now 65 years old, but his voice still has a teenage hesitation-hiccup dramatic intensity. The sheer sound of the record is a marvel. Smith co-produced the LP with with the Cure’s former recording engineer Paul Corkett, and that duo happens to be the same team who handled the Bloodflowers production. Together, they understand how a Cure record should sound.
For the first time since A Head In The Door, Robert Smith wrote all the songs on Songs Of A Lost World entirely by himself, with no songwriting credits for any of his bandmates. You can’t tell. Smith has always been the key songwriter in the Cure, but Songs Of A Lost World sounds like a band at work. Maybe that’s because the Cure have been playing these songs live for years now; they’ve had time to gel. Everyone shines on the record. Former David Bowie sideman Reeves Gabrels has been the Cure’s full-time guitarist since 2012, but this is the first time he’s gotten to play on one of the band’s records. His leads — molten rock riffage, blurred through layers of silk and muslin — add psychedelic swoop and grandeur. Drummer Jason Cooper absolutely wallops, and the production artfully muffles him without taking away his power. The band understands how to churn and linger, and the songs build with assured grace. These guys are fully dialed in with each other.
Songs Of A Lost World isn’t a terribly long record, but it takes its time. Often, Robert Smith’s voice won’t come in until the song is nearly half over. The rest of the band will set an atmosphere, growling and swooshing and echoing, before Smith comes in with his instantly familiar moan. When Smith does sing, his voice comes up from a well of despair. For decades, Smith has pushed back on the idea of the Cure as kings of gloom-rock. But Smith wrote these songs while he was mourning the losses of his mother, his father, and his older brother. If there’s ever been a good excuse to get maudlin, it’s continuing to live life on this planet without the people who loom largest in your memory.
Without context, some of the lyrics on Songs Of A Lost World might look histrionic on paper: “Something wicked this way comes from out the cruel and treacherous night/ Something wicked this way comes to steal away my brother’s life.” But even if you don’t know Robert Smith’s biographical details, you can tell that there’s no pastiche, no character-setting, in the way that he sings words like that. Instead, he relies on a long-established persona to help make sense of very real losses. Annihilation and solitude presumably feel very different now than they did with Smith was a young man, but he’s spent his life developing a sonic language to explore those themes, and he’s taking full advantage today.
The songs on Songs Of A Lost World are variations on a theme. Musically, we get peaks and valleys. “Drone Nodrone” is the hardest, most immediate track on the LP. It’s got some of the same guttural churn that the Cure brought to “Fascination Street,” and I’m a bit impressed that the band didn’t release it as a red-herring early single. By contrast, “Endsong” is a luxuriant closer that stretches over 10 minutes, and there’s something ecstatic about its sighing, expensive-sounding synths. But while the moods shift, the message remains the same: The world’s light is dimming, and you can see your own end coming around the corner.
On “Alone,” the album’s stunning opener and first single, Robert Smith raises his glass to oblivion: “Here is to love, to all the love falling out of our lives/ Hopes and dreams are gone/ The end of every song.” In the songs that follow, Smith asks himself the same questions and gives himself the same answers again and again. “I’m pretty much done.” “I’m outside in the dark, wondering how I got so old.” “I know that my world is grown old and nothing is forever.” “My weary dance of age and resignation moves me slow toward a dark and empty stage where I can sing of all I know.”
If I didn’t know better, Songs Of A Lost World might sound like a farewell, a final statement. But Smith is already talking about releasing another two Cure albums over the next few years. So maybe Songs Of A Lost World is more a document of someone resigning himself to living in a state of constant loss, the saddest byproduct of surviving long enough to lose a whole lot of people. The miracle of Songs Of A Lost World is that Smith never sounds like he’s crushed under that weight. Instead, he describes and evokes those feelings with muscle and vitality and commitment. He’s speaking a language that he’s largely responsible for encoding, and he’s got complete command of that vocabulary.
In the end, that’s the beauty of Songs Of A Lost World. It’s not a perfect album. It’s limited in sound and scope and mood. If you’re not in the right headspace, it could sound leaden or one-note. If you are in the right headspace, it could become your entire universe. Songs Of A Lost World isn’t one of the best Cure albums; it might not even be in the top half of the band’s discography. It’s probably not one of the year’s best, either, though it would be a lock for any longer list that I might make. The album doesn’t need to be any of those things. Without going overboard, Songs Of A Lost World is a triumph of craft and feeling. It’s a gorgeous and fully realized piece of work from a band that looked like it might never make another one. I don’t have to exaggerate one bit when I say that its existence is a miracle.
Setting up for today
Setting up for The Cure at BBC Radio Theatre. If you're wondering, that Cat on the screen is from the Riot Fest poster.
Thanks, Andy.
Indies exclusive vinyl
👀 THE CURE 👀
a first look at the indies exclusive of the new album Songs Of A Lost World
https://www.banquetrecords.com/search?q=songs+of+a+lost+world
The Cure at the BBC Radio Theatre today
Today, Oct. 30th, The Cure are at the BBC Radio Theatre in London for...
Robert Smith's interview with Huw Stephens
BBC6 Music live session
BBC Radio 2 In Concert
Robert's interview with Jo Whiley
No live broadcast today, we have to wait until tomorrow. Then...
The Cure at the BBC schedule for Oct. 31st
4 - 6pm (Radio 6) - Huw Stephens interview with Robert Smith
6pm (Radio 6) - BBC 6 Music live session
7pm (Radio 2) - BBC Radio 2 Live In Concert
8:20pm (Radio 2) - After-party with Jo Whiley's interview with Robert
And then on Saturday Nov. 2nd, BBC Two will air BBC Radio 2's The Cure In Concert at 9:10pm.
The turbulent journey to The Cure’s first album in 16 years
From The Independent:
False starts and false promises: The turbulent journey to The Cure’s first album in 16 years
In 2008, Robert Smith told Mark Beaumont fans had only six months to wait for the band’s 14th album – 16 years later, the seminal alt-rock band have finally followed through on their promise with the brilliant new ‘Songs of a Lost World’. Here, Beaumont chronicles a rocky ride to release
From the smeared red lips of rock’s foremost man of murk came a solemn promise. “Have we recorded any more songs?” asked Robert Smith, lounged on a studio sofa in his inky black finery. “We might have done. We may well have recorded 32 songs and I fully intend to release part two of this project within the next six months.” The only thing holding back the 14th Cure album, he explained, was record label red tape.
The year was 2008 and, in an East Sussex recording studio decked out like a haunted forest, Smith and I were conducting the only promotional interview for that year’s new Cure record 4:13 Dream – a follow-up to their self-titled release four years earlier. For the band’s legions of dark, devoted fans, the revelation that 4:13 Dream was the first half of a double album (a doomier sister-piece forthcoming) was like hearing that Da Vinci had also done a Mona Larry he just had to fetch from the shed.
As a band who mastered the balance of accessible indie rock and pop hits (“The Lovecats”, “In Between Days”, “Why Can’t I Be You?”, “Friday I’m in Love”) with soul-scouring monuments of atmospheric exorcism and glacial enormity, The Cure are behind some of alt-rock’s most seminal output. Take the “goth trilogy” of Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982). Or their intoxicating statement records like 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1992’s Wish, and 1989’s glowering masterpiece Disintegration. And now their own version of Guns N’ Roses’ dual album behemoths Use Your Illusion I and II? It was too good to be true.
Six months later, the second half of 4:13 Dream failed to materialise. Six years on, in 2014, there was word of two outtake albums, 4.14 Scream and a double called 4.26 Dream, but neither of those emerged either. Little did Cure fans know, the band were in the beginnings of one of the longest and most frustrating creative silences since My Bloody Valentine fanatics had to wait 22 years for a follow-up to 1991’s shoegaze benchmark Loveless.
Making Kate Bush’s output look like the Now! series, Smith took 16 years to release his 14th studio album, this week’s Songs of a Lost World. The consensus is, it was worth the wait. Far from being a dated drag through the past decade-plus of shifting alternative styles, the album beautifully remodels The Cure’s core aesthetic – stalking crepuscular rock, galactic glistening, storm-in-limbo cataclysm – for the earthy yet synthetic modern age. Opener “Alone” marries warping nu-shoegaze clatter to crackling antique strings. “Warsong” is as grungy and sludgy as any of PJ Harvey’s ancient battlefields. “Drone: No Drone” is The Cure’s classic intense electro rock given a surveillance era update, while “And Nothing is Forever”, a song about a promise Smith made to be with someone on their deathbed, unfolds from its gossamer piano intro into a sonic corridor of light.
It’s also a record on which Smith philosophically matures. His trademark angst and despair are tempered by the sedative of experience. He picks out the celebration and nobility in death, the foolishness in warfare, the fragility in love and, on “I Can Never Say Goodbye”, the cruel grind in grief.
So what took so long? According to Smith’s recent filmed interview with 6 Music’s Matt Everitt, whatever wrangles scuppered the release of Songs of a Lost World seem to have left him with no pressing interest in further studio endeavours. “I don’t think there was really an official beginning to this album because it’s been kind of drifting in and out of my life for an awful long time,” he said. “There are various points where I thought, ‘I think we’re going to make a new album.’ And then… other things have happened and the idea’s been pushed back.”
Instead, without a record deal to rush them along, the band concentrated on live activity, playing a series of Reflections shows in 2011 – full run-throughs of their first three albums in a single night – and several festival tours with new guitarist Reeves Gabrels of Tin Machine infamy. It was only the approach of the band’s 40th anniversary in 2018, marked by Smith curating the annual Meltdown festival and playing Hyde Park as part of the British Summer Time shows, that raised the prospect of one final studio blow-out.
“I was thinking we’ll do something that sums up what the band is and where we’ve got to,” Smith said of a record he began writing in 2017. “It was a grand plan and grand plans generally don’t work very well in my experience. It wasn’t really being done for the right reasons.”
Smith envisioned the band’s 40th celebrations as a good point to end The Cure. “I thought every moment from this point on is pretty much a bonus,” he said. “I thought that the Hyde Park show would be it – that that was the end of The Cure… It was only because it was such a great day with such a great response and I enjoyed it so much, and we got a flood of offers to headline every European festival [including] Glastonbury, [I thought] maybe it’s not the right time to stop.”
The 2018 anniversary album inevitably failed to materialise. Instead, in 2019, Smith announced that The Cure had been recording some of the tracks in one of the studios where Queen had recorded “Bohemian Rhapsody”. “We recorded 25, 26 songs,” he told Everitt. “We recorded three albums in 2019. That’s always been the problem because I’ve been trying to get three albums completed. My idea was this – after waiting this long, let’s just throw out Cure albums every few months.”
A confident Smith hinted at a Halloween drop date: “I feel intent on it being a 2019 release and would be extremely bitter if it isn’t,” he told NME at the time. But his mouth was writing cheques that his schedule couldn’t cash. “If I have one regret it’s that I said anything at all about it in 2019,” he told Everitt today. “I really shouldn’t have done, because we only just started creating it.” Yet the extra time taken allowed him to evolve the idea of the album away from a summary celebration of an arbitrary year. “[It became] much more natural,” he said, “much more artistic.”
During lockdown, Smith spent time reading voraciously – War and Peace, every John le Carré – and listening to demos of discarded songs from earlier sessions recorded as far back as 1991. Tracks begun in 2010, 2011 and 2013 were added to the pot and Songs of a Lost World began to find a firmer outline. Key to the cohesion was finding a beginning and end to the record. “Alone” was inspired by the 1902 poem “Dregs” by Ernest Dowson and “Endsong” by a starlit night that reminded Smith of a similar evening in 1969, stargazing in the back garden with his father when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
“I remembered the feeling of, like, ‘I didn’t believe it’,” he said. “I grew up in the glorious 30 years from the end of the Second World War – the world that I was born into was getting incrementally better every year. It just seemed that the world was on an upward trajectory and the moon landing was part of that. And around the time I turned 16 in ’75, it seemed like the world sort of stalled and it’s been travelling down ever since.”
In June 2021, Smith began talking in the press about two new albums in the pipeline, completed bar the mixing. “One of them’s very, very doom and gloom and the other one isn’t,” he told Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe; in May 2022 he promised that the first would come out ahead of that October’s European tour (it didn’t). The doom-and-gloom one was Songs of a Lost World – though, over the coming three years, it developed a brighter aspect.
“I was imagining [with] this album, everything was going to be relentlessly downbeat,” he said, “and then a few people who I trust listened to it and said…‘It’s too much, you can’t expect people to listen to this much doom and gloom.’” As six songs were trialled on tour and tinkered with in the studio afterwards, Smith subsequently trimmed the album down from 13 tracks to eight and replaced some of the bleaker tracks. “It is a much better record for it,” he concluded, “because it has a bit of light and dark.
Announced in as low-key a manner as possible – with cryptic postcards to fans and a single poster placed outside the Crawley pub where The Cure played their earliest shows – that Songs of a Lost World is here at all is a minor miracle of aligning stars, foiled endings and unabating inspiration. It’s a record that, itself, refused to be lost. And though Smith claims to have two more albums almost ready to release (fool us once, etcetera) before he plans to retire the band when he reaches 70 years old in 2029, Songs of a Lost World would work wonderfully as a forlorn final word from The Cure. Particularly since the austere, 10-minute “Endsong” closes with Smith’s entire world dissolving into a nihilistic blackness: “I will lose myself in time/ no hopes, no dreams, no world… left alone with nothing at the end of every song,” he wails. “Nothing, nothing, nothing”.
‘Songs of a Lost World’ is out on 1 November via Fiction/Polydor
4.5 stars for Lost World from Louder
From Louder:
Robert Smith charts his own grief and anxiety on The Cure's sombre Songs Of A Lost World
4.5/5
By Alex Burrows
Partly road-tested live over the past two years, the dense orchestral arrangements of those new songs trialled inevitably led to speculation this new album by The Cure would be a sequel to diehard fan favourite, 1989’s Disintegration. But Songs Of A Lost World is a different animal.
Where Disintegration provided light amongst its melancholy, Songs From A Lost World is darker and downbeat – a blend of Disintegration and Pornography-era Cure. But its position in the overall Cure canon is less relevant than where it stands in 2024. Because where it stands in 2024 is backcombed head and sloped shoulders above the dreck of indie/goth rock revivalists.
Other than 1985’s The Head On The Door, Songs From A Lost World is the only album in the band’s discography written solely by bandleader Robert Smith. Informed by the death of his parents and older brother, it’s an intensely personal – and ruthless – exercise in catharsis. A mournful piano lament emerges from a rainstorm on the touching I Can Never Say Goodbye as he grieves ‘I’m down on my knees and empty inside/ Something wicked this way comes/To steal away my brother’s life’ over an ululating riff.
Smith has consistently – with deft subtlety – combined personal trauma with environmentalist and anti-war rhetoric. Pornography opener One Hundred Years was a primal scream against the entire 20th century’s destruction and bloodshed. Here, Smith merges those beliefs with personal tragedy, his enduring love for his wife Mary, and (having turned 65 this year), his own mortality. Opener and lead-off single Alone despairs at Earth’s destruction and humanity’s impotency to alter it. The exquisite piano/strings arrangement and soaring keyboard wash of the tender And Nothing Is Forever is most redolent of Disintegration but superior to Lovesong or Pictures Of You in its poignant heartbreak.
A Fragile Thing reflects its refrain of personal love to the natural world: ‘This love is my everything/But nothing you can do/To change the end'. Warsong’s tempestuous and discordant guitar squall compares personal battles to the “bitter ends” of misery wrought by geopolitical machinations. The bass-driven schizoid psyche of the agitated Drone:Nodrone is an internal dialogue battling itself. 10-minute closer Endsong encapsulates the entire bleak, discomfiting desolation of Songs From A Lost World right up to Smith’s unforgiving parting shot.
A sombre treatise on disaffection and alienation grown old, Songs From A Lost World starkly expresses the post-punk generation’s hallmark traits of malaise and anxiety. Art reflects its era and that’s exactly what this album conveys.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
5 stars for Lost World from The Skinny
Lost World review from Ultimate Classic Rock
From Ultimate Classic Rock:
The Cure, ‘Songs of a Lost World': Album Review
Michael Gallucci
The long path to the Cure's 14th album, and the first in 16 years since the release of 4:13 Dream, has been marked by occasional live performances, a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction and another lineup change. Songs of a Lost World was in the planning stages for more than a decade and was first scheduled for release in 2019; so if expectations fluttered somewhere between cautious anticipation and nervous apprehension, the good news is that the finally delivered record is worth the delay.
Where 2008's 4:13 Dream often seemed to play like the Cure's greatest hits without the hits, Songs of a Lost World is something different: a summation of a career that sounds like both a progression and a milestone. It's familiar in parts, but these moments serve as reminders of just how adept and intrinsic Robert Smith and the band are at reaching atmospheric highs (often at six or more minutes) and then sustaining that momentum throughout a record.
The subtleness with which the Cure assembles the eight songs befits Songs of a Lost World's main themes, which mostly deal with loss and mortality. Smith, now 65, announced before the album's release that he plans to retire in five years; Songs of a Lost World is mournful but it only occasionally sounds like the end of something. It may be a stretch to call this a new beginning, but the Cure hasn't been this compelling on record in more than three decades.
"This is the end of every song that we sing" are the opening words on the album - nearly three and a half minutes into "Alone" and the halfway mark of the song - and they begin this record of deep introspection with notes of grace and elegance. "And Nothing Is Forever" continues the theme as a slow-building dirge that reaches a moment of peace by the end of its seven minutes; "A Fragile Thing," meanwhile, repeats "Nothing you can do to change the end" as a sort of mantra.
Several of the songs were previewed during a lengthy 2023 tour, but the band - returning members Simon Gallup (bass), Jason Cooper (drums) and Roger O'Donnell (keyboards), and former David Bowie guitarist Reeves Gabrels, with the Cure for more than a decade but making his recorded debut with them here - sounds perfectly comfortable with them in this setting, whether it's the psychedelic wah guitar of "Drone:nodrone" or the midtempo "All I Ever Am," which could be a lost cut from the early '90s. "I'm outside in the dark wondering how I got so old," Smith sings in the 10-minute closing track, "Endsong," "I will lose myself in time." It's a fitting conclusion to Songs of a Lost World and, depending on where Smith plans to go next, maybe the Cure.