Review Summary: This is the end of every song we sing.
At some point in the last decade or so, it occurred to me that The Cure were my favourite band of all time. It was no great, earth-shaking revelation, no epiphanic "Hot Hot Hot!!!"-style lightning strike (for which I thank my lucky stars). It was an almost casual shrugging realisation, the end result of an inertial buildup over years and years: snatches of music videos seen over my parents' shoulders as a child, absorbing "Just Like Heaven" and "Inbetween Days" by osmosis long before my circuits were developed enough to analyse music as anything other than pleasant noise. It was a steady, slow process over most of my life until I was fully subsumed, discovering "Jupiter Crash" and arguing how could an album with that song on it be
that bad, falling in love with b-sides and demos and that fucking heater of a song on
The Crow soundtrack – I distinctly remember one sleepless night just after I moved out of home, watching the sun come up over Sydney,
Join the Dots in my headphones, all these unfamiliar-but-familiar-feeling songs perfectly soundtracking my uncertainty and, to tell the truth, absolute goddamn terror about what I would do with my life next. It's a journey many can roughly relate to, even if not everyone has had tears prick up in their eyes to "The Exploding Boy" standing out on a freezing balcony after a night of insomnia and anxiety, because The Cure have something for everyone. Whether you're whistling "Friday" over a top 40 station on your way to work or spending an evening staring at the bottom of the bottle with
Disintegration on wax, the specifics don't really matter. We've all been there, man, and The Cure are the ultimate band, sometimes the
only band when you're down there.
It's appropriate that it was a process of years for me to fall in love with this band, because it took The Cure almost as long to fall back in love with their own music, or at least that's the impression that I get from recent interviews and press. It's been sixteen years since they last graced our speakers, and since then we've had cancelled double albums, promises that fell through, health issues and god only knows what else; a tour beginning in 2022 saw the debut of new songs that had apparently been painstakingly pieced together in the intervening time, the majority of which are on
Songs of a Lost World. Things had changed since
4:13 Dream came and went with little fanfare: longtime guitarist Porl Thompson was replaced by Bowie collaborator and wah-wah enthusiast Reeves Gabrels, and veterans of various Cure eras Roger O'Donnell and Perry Bamonte reunited with mainstay Simon Gallup, whose incredible basslines are the bedrock of every great Cure song and probably still the best part of the less great ones. The newly six-piece band sounded full of new energy and vitality going into their fourth decade as a touring act, the new songs penned by the inimitable Robert Smith swaying with gentle majesty and sadness.
Considering recent years have seen the death of Smith's father, mother and brother as well as a cancer diagnosis for keyboardist O'Donnell, one can be forgiven for expecting an album that tends towards the grimmer side, and an 8-song tracklist totalling nearly 50 minutes was a clear sign that we were back in introspective territory after the frivolous pop exercises on
4:13 Dream. Indeed this is the darkest Cure album since
Disintegration, and it feels designed to recall that album's glacial pacing and introspective nature, but it's no one-note slog, nor is it an over-the-hill band repeating their greatest hits.
Songs of a Lost World has the feel of an album patiently mapped out and painstakingly assembled, thanks to a thickly textured production job with an absolutely filthy low end which Gallup milks for all it's worth. We even seem to follow a classic three-act structure, easing in with the dulcet midtempo tones of "Alone" and the absolutely gorgeous "And Nothing Is Forever", a song which could have been recorded on the same day as "To Wish Impossible Things" with its ethereal keys and patiently unwinding string accompaniment. We follow the rising action to the only trace of The Cure's poppier side on "A Fragile Thing", through to the pummeling "Warsong" and the borderline industrial "Drone:Nodrone", punishing songs with traces of the alt-metal the band dabbled in on 2004's self-titled release. There's the gutwrenching "I Can Never Say Goodbye", written about the death of Smith's brother, and the hypnotic "Endsong", the latest in a long line of meditations on death and ageing to close a Cure album, Smith looping back to where we began the record "left alone with nothing at the end of every song", a dark cycle that captures the seemingly perpetual process of grief. The only small fly in this gothic ointment is "All I Ever Am", a rhythmically awkward song Smith seems to be struggling to find a good melody to sing to.
Even with its minor misstep,
Songs of a Lost World is a singularly sombre picture of triumph, a band in their collective 60s still making music so vital and beautiful it can genuinely steal the words from your mouth and the heat from the room. Perhaps the most curious thing about it is how much it feels crafted as a farewell, the stately, elegaic cry of "Endsong" a towering final statement on par with the likes of Bowie's "I Can't Give Everything Away". But another album is allegedly in the works; whether it actually eventuates or goes the way of the mythical lost
4:14 Scream is anybody's guess. It's hard to imagine a more definitive final statement from The Cure than this, but at the same time
Songs of a Lost World is testament to how much this once in a lifetime band has left to say. Smith may be "outside in the dark wondering how I got so old" in the album's twilight moments, but his seemingly ageless voice, the renewed chemistry of the band and the power of these songs could slip you back to the days when
Disintegration was fresh on the shelves in a heartbeat. That's the true magic in this music, the closest you and I will ever get to time travel; slipping back and back through years and years, inbetween all those days, to a small child peeking over his parents' shoulders and seeing something beyond his comprehension, but so beautiful and already so familiar.
