Songs of a Lost World by The Cure (Review)

It’s been a long and winding road to Songs of a Lost World. Robert Smith first teased The Cure’s fourteenth album all the way back in July 2012 and then in February 2014, announced that it’d be titled 4:14 Scream, only to backtrack a few months later. In May 2016, the band debuted several new songs during their tour. The following years saw even more announcements from the Cure camp, including plans to release three new albums — but no release ever actually emerged to deliver on Smith’s various promises.

Cure fans may be devoted, but we know better than to take Robert Smith’s announcements sans many grains of salt. But given the middling quality of The Cure’s last few albums (e.g., 2008’s 4:13 Dream, 2004’s self-titled affair), can you blame us for getting excited and hopeful whenever Smith dropped a little nugget?

So here we are now, in the Year of our Lord 2024, and The Cure have finally released an honest-to-goodness new album — albeit one that comes with sixteen years’ worth of hopes, fears, and anticipation involving one of the most iconic bands in the history of alternative music. Is it even possible, then, to review Songs of a Lost World with any semblance of objectivity? And given their revered discography, can it live up to whatever Cure fans like myself have been imagining all this time?

Put simply, Songs of a Lost World is The Cure’s strongest album since 1992’s Wish, and in its best moments, evokes the grandeur of their magnum opus, 1989’s Disintegration. It’s also their heaviest album ever, and not just because its songs are so densely layered. The album packs a muscular intensity, thanks in large part to Simon Gallup’s fuzz-laden bass and guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who joined the band in 2012. Gabrels’ searing riffs and virtuosic playing are some of the album’s most defining aspects, particularly on “Warsong,” “Drone:Nodrone,” and “Endsong,” and push the album in directions The Cure have never really explored before. Not with this much volume, anyway.

But there’s also a lyrical heaviness that feels unique in The Cure’s catalog. When keyboardist Roger O’Donnell described the new material as “the most intense, saddest, most dramatic, and most emotional record we’ve ever made” back in 2020, he wasn’t kidding. Don’t expect any starry-eyed love songs; these 49 minutes contain nothing like “Just Like Heaven” or “Friday I’m in Love.” Nor will you hear any of the giddily florid imagery that usually characterizes Smith’s songwriting; there are no love cats or candy-stripe legs, no one’s “kitten as a cat,” and there’s certainly no “shaking like milk.”

Instead, Songs of a Lost World features some of Smith’s most direct lyrics, which isn’t surprising given that he lost his parents and older brother in the years leading up to the album; his grief is an ever-present specter here. Thus, Songs of a Lost World’s emotional heaviness feels distinct from the nihilism of, say, 1982’s Pornography. Rather, it stems from Robert Smith — who turned 65 this year, as evidenced by his graying and thinning tousle of hair — mourning those who’ve gone before him and ultimately, confronting his own mortality.

Opening a Cure album with “This is the end of every song that we sing/The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears” is a very Cure thing to do, especially after a minutes-long intro of slow-burning guitars and swirling synths. But “Alone” hits harder given Smith’s age. And, for that matter, the age of many Cure fans, myself included. When he sings “We were always sure that we would never changе” or references a “broken voiced lament to call us home,” you feel the ache deep down in your soul, a sensation enhanced by a majestic swell of sound that rivals Disintegration’s cathedral-like “Plainsong.” (It also doesn’t hurt that Smith’s voice sounds just as good in 2024 as it did in 1984.)

“Endsong” closes the album with a similarly majestic sense of loss. Referencing childhood memories of stargazing with his father, Smith wonders “what became of that boy and the world he called his own” and cries out “It’s all gone, it’s all gone/Nothing left of all I loved” whilst accompanied by keening guitar notes and O’Donnell’s synths, which have rarely sounded this sweeping or massive. Indeed, everyone sounds great on this album, though Jason Cooper’s drums are occasionally thin and compressed relative to everything else. (If I have one complaint with the album, the mix is too overblown at times, resulting in some of those aforementioned layers getting lost or diluted.)

Flowing between those two songs is a river of lament. Inspired by a promise that Smith made to be with someone on their deathbed, the stately “And Nothing Is Forever” contains pleas (“Slide down close beside me/In the silence of a heartbeat/And wrap your arms around me”) and reflection (“I know that my world has grown old/And nothing is forever”) followed by the album’s most uplifting sentiment: “But it really doesn’t matter/If you say we’ll be together/If you promise you’ll be with me in the end.”

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Cure album without at least one song about romantic regret. Enter “A Fragile Thing,” which boasts such delightfully overwrought lyrics as “Every time you kiss me, I could cry/Don’t tell me how you miss me, I could die tonight of a broken heart/This loneliness has changed me, we have been too far apart” Those lyrics are accented by a guitar solo that hearkens back to Wish-era mopers like “Apart” and “A Letter to Elise.”

“I Can Never Say Goodbye” is the album’s most emotional moment, with Smith borrowing from Shakespeare (e.g., “Something wicked this way comes/To steal away my brother’s lifе”) to communicate his dread at the loss of his beloved brother Richard while Gabrels unleashes a heart-wrenching solo. Sadly, Gabrels’ playing on the album is a bit squelched in the mix compared to the gut-wrenching solo he performed when I saw them last year.

Finally, the synth-led “All I Ever Am” finds Smith admitting to his “weary dance with age and resignation” and inability to focus on the present. Now, I was ready to mope while listening to a new Cure album. I was ready to get nice and properly sad. I was not, however, prepared to be called out. But as someone who tends toward nostalgia and over-thinking the past, I feel more than a little seen — and convicted — by the song’s chorus:

I waste all my world like this
Intending time and memories
And all for fear of what I’ll find
If I just stop and empty out my mind
Of all the ghosts and all the dreams
All I hold to in belief that all I ever am
Is somehow never quite all I am now

That’s always been the attraction of The Cure’s music, though, hasn’t it? As expected — and yes, hoped for — there’s a lot of darkness in these eight songs, though not simply for the sake of just being doomy and gloomy. But as Cure fans know, there’s something comforting about that darkness. It grants you permission to admit that sometimes, life can be too much even as it offers solace and reminds you that you’re not alone in feeling lost and overwhelmed.

According to Smith, Songs of a Lost World won’t be The Cure’s final album; in a recent interview with NPR’s Stephen Thompson, he mentioned two more albums, one of which is already more than halfway done. (He also revealed that he’s taken up shepherding, something I doubt even the most ardent fan would’ve expected.) The band’s unimpeachable live presence — they played an epic three-hour show for Songs of a Lost World’s release — also seems like a sure sign that they aren’t slowing down anytime soon. But remember what I said about Smith’s announcements and grains of salt?

Whatever happens down the road, Songs of a Lost World possesses an undeniable sense of finality. If — heaven forbid! — it does prove to be their final album, then Robert Smith and the boys can rest easy knowing that they’ve met and exceeded their fans’ expectations, and gone out in a manner befitting the finest — and gloomiest — Cure tradition.