The Cure’s ‘Songs of a Lost World’ Is What Happens When Goth Starts Getting Real
The legendary band has long contemplated the darker side of life. But at 65, Robert Smith is now writing some of the best songs of his career about grief, aging, and actual death.
For whatever reason—artistic stasis, over-comfort, interpersonal issues—it’s not very common for a long-lasting band to make one of their best albums almost five decades into their career. Enter: the Cure. Even Robert Smith, the eyelinered icon who wrote, produced, and arranged the entirety of Songs of a Lost World for a lineup that’s remained more or less the same since the 1990s, seems shocked by the fact that this music even exists. “It’s slightly bewildering, if I’m honest,” he said, in a nearly two-hour-long interview about the making of the album, the Cure’s first in 16 years. And that was weeks before the goth and post-punk heroes found themselves debuting at No. 4 on the Billboard album chart, between Lil Uzi Vert and Gracie Abrams—an achievement that reflects the Western cultural mood as much as anything else.
An album about grief is unfortunately perfect for 2024; between the multiple genocides, the climate emergency, the rise of authoritarianism, and a million other things, despair is really hitting right now. Who better to usher us through the process than the godfather of melancholy, the guy whose words have already helped generations of teens, depressed and skulking in our bedrooms, remember we aren’t alone? But Songs of a Lost World doesn’t play on nostalgia, even if its closest analog in the Cure’s discography is the brooding 1989 classic Disintegration. On this album, Smith shows his work: With songs written as early as 2010—when he was 51 and hitting the thicket of middle age—up to the last couple of years, when our cheeky gloom king has achieved senior citizenship, he has sloughed away the emotionally tumultuous trappings of younger life and is looking mortality straight in its face.
Besides, the Cure has already gone down that road. Their last album, 2008’s 4:13 Dream, seemed like an effort to capture the best moments in their catalog, though their hearts didn’t seem entirely in it. Songs like “The Scream” and “Freakshow” felt like lesser callbacks to classics like “The Blood” and its flamenco inspiration, and “Hot Hot Hot!!!,” with its angular guitars and mischief. It was a respectable foray nonetheless, and you couldn’t overly blame a group that formed in 1976 for trying to get that old thing back. But it seemed to signal the Cure were going to continue doing what they do, and you could either take it or leave it.
Yet in the years since, with a robust touring schedule and transformational personal shifts, Smith has tapped into a new well of inspiration. Grappling with the death of his parents and brother, Smith finds himself accepting his own position in life at 65, and delving into a genius that has shifted and evolved. (“I feel pretty much the same way standing outside looking up at the moon as I did when I was 10,” Smith wrote in the album’s press materials, “but I know the world under my feet is not the same as it was, and I know that neither am I.”) The Cure has its signature palette—wall-of-sound guitars, a light bit of flange, sweeping synths, and Smith’s impish alto alternately keening and teasing—but here they blow out their sound to new effect, with songwriting that speaks gently to the depths of human experience.
Songs of a Lost World opens with “Alone,” as classic a Cure song as can be: a three-minute instrumental intro of guitars reverbing with the flow of coastal waves and synth embellishments that patter in like rain. Once you’re immersed in their dreary, minor-keyed mise en scène, Smith enters with a quavering diagnosis:
This is the end of every song that we sing
The fire burned out to ash, and the stars grown dim with tears
Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been
We toast with bitter dregs, to our emptiness
As often happens in Cure songs, his existential dismay is betrayed by lavish harmonies, suggesting that even at the worst, hope is never lost. Smith is processing rather than surrendering, giving space and time to the depression so that it can live and then be subsumed by the necessity of moving forward. It’s here you might realize that all the time you spent in seventh grade blasting “Prayers for Rain” and weeping under your comforter was not wallowing but was instead a form of self-soothing. (Not that I did that or anything.)
Similarly, a crackling guitar grind sets the tone for defiance on the post-punkish “All I Ever Am.” Smith names his own imperfections in disgust, a purging of his worst impulses that ends in a release. “I waste all my world like this/Intending time and memories,” he sings, “And all for fear of what I’ll find/If I just stop and empty out my mind.” Same! But the song comes with a sense of relief, like the exhale of acceptance. He is the same languishing rascal he’s always been, but maturity has brought him, and maybe us, to a place of peace with that.
This is a band unparalleled at conjuring a melancholy mood, so much so that the artistic and emotional process of its players can become obscured. (Reminder: They’re not just a bunch of Winklepicker-wearing depression-mongers, in fact plenty of Cure songs are quite funny.) The album’s downpour breaks on “And Nothing Is Forever,” which modulates into a major-key sweep of synths and Smith’s reminder that he’s always been a consummate romantic. “Hold me for the last time in the dying of the light,” he sings, as if through a wry, lipsticked smile. “I know that my world has grown old, but it really doesn’t matter if you say that we’ll be together.”
Though the album contains just eight songs (that’s how you know they’re old-school), it is dense with this ebb and flow—the acceptance of our inevitable demise and the hope surrounding the time we still have. In that same long interview, Smith spoke about writing “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” the song most explicitly about his brother’s death, which slow-dances between a repeating guitar chord and piano melody. “When you’re younger, you romanticize [death], even without knowing it,” he said. “Then it starts happening to your immediate family and friends and suddenly it’s a different thing.” Smith has always had a proclivity for morbid scene-setting, and earlier albums possessed a Shelleyan gloom, like if you didn’t take what Smith was singing on its face you could imagine the furious literary study he was doing to get there. When the subject is this specific, though, the songs feel even rawer and more delicate, turning the rock legend into another human who’s dealing with the same bullshit life throws at us all.
Songs of a Lost World isn’t perfect: Reeves Gabrels’ guitar-god solos on “Drone:Nodrone” and the otherwise gorgeous “Endsong” feel extraneous, and distance the band from their punk origins in a way that might not sit quite right to those of us who still worship at the altar of The Head on the Door. (Though they’ve always had a bit of a hankering for wank—recall the wah-wah noodle explosion in the middle of Wish’s “Cut,” and their general adoration for psychedelia.) Similarly, this album may not convert anyone. It’s outstanding material, but if you’ve heard any of their albums from approximately 1982 to now, you generally know what you’re getting.
Still, this may be as close to perfect as a new Cure album could get, with Smith’s sharp storytelling and thematic cohesion taking us into an immersive universe that ends, appropriately, with him trailing off: “Left alone with nothing at the end of every song… nothing… nothing… nothing.” If it all feels like wrapping yourself up in a comforter and really feeling your feelings… congratulations. You’re home now.
