The Cure’s 2026 Looks Pretty Promising

Yes, yes, I know… any talk about new music from Robert Smith and The Cure should be preceded by numerous caveats. After all, they took sixteen years to release a new album, last year’s acclaimed Songs of a Lost World. But now, as we near that album’s one-year anniversary, there’s been a flurry of activity in the Cure camp, which certainly seems to suggest that 2026 is going to be a good year for fans.

For starters, the band’s extensive bio has been updated with two interesting tidbits. The first is that The Cure entered the studio in March 2025 to record 13 songs for their follow-up to Songs of a Lost World. Smith has, of course, dropped several hints in the last twelve months concerning his band’s next album. He’s called it a companion piece to Songs of a Lost World that includes several songs that didn’t make it onto that album, including “It Can Never Be the Same” and “A Boy I Never Knew,” and described it as “a very long way from being an upbeat album” — which is surely welcome news for Cure fans.

The second tidbit is that Smith also returned to the studio to work on The Show of a Lost World concert film, which presumably refers to The Cure’s epic Troxy set to celebrate the release of Songs of a Lost World. Over the course of three hours, Smith and Co. performed their new album in its entirety followed by a collection of classics spanning their entire discography (see the full setlist). The show was live-streamed and then made available on YouTube for a short time, but apparently an official release is in the works. Watch The Cure’s Troxy performance of “A Fragile Thing” below.

The Cure aren’t slowing down their live performances, either. They’ve announced several summer 2026 dates, including the Primavera Sound festival as well as their very first appearance in Bulgaria, at the Phillgood Festival. Openers for The Cure on those dates will include The Twilight Sad, Mogwai, and Slowdive.

Although Smith is nearing 70, he’s clearly enjoying this phase of The Cure. In an interview with Matt Everitt shortly after the release of Songs of a Lost World, he outlined his vision to keep playing concerts up to the band’s 50th anniversary in 2029: “In the intervening time, I’d like to include playing concerts as part of the overall plan of what we’re going to do. I’ve loved it; 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! It’s been great.”

Finally, in related news, Cure keyboardist Roger O’Donnell is set to release his new album, Pojections, on October 29, 2025. Last year, O’Donnell was diagnosed with lymphoma, which he has thankfully overcome. Not surprisingly, the new album is a reflection on that period of time, during which he was unable to play or perform. As he explains in a recent interview:

Music has always been an emotional outlet for me. I live a very happy life, I’m a pretty happy person, and the emotion comes out in the music. I was unable to play while I was going through it because my emotions were at number 11. To sit down at the piano, I would just burst into tears. It was a very difficult period for me emotionally and creatively. As soon as I was over it, it was like the floodgates opened.

O’Donnell shared a brief preview from the album on Bluesky, which certainly seems to indicate an appropriately reflective album.