The Cure Songs Of A Lost World Review: An audaciously bleak, beautiful journey

The Cure

Songs Of A Lost World

★★★★

FICTION

There is no blue plaque at The Railway in Crawley, no photographs celebrating the most culturally significant moment in the pub’s history: the first official gig by The Cure (formerly Easy Cure) in 1978. Yet The Rocket has once again become embroiled in The Cure’s epic story. On September 13, a dark poster appeared outside, reading “Songs Of A Lost World” and a date: “I. XI. MMXXIV.”

Sixteen years after the release of 4:13 Dream, The Cure’s long-promised 14th album is finally a reality, and it’s clear now why The Cure launched it at their point of origin. Songs Of A Lost World is a record about endings, about loss and grief, about the compromises and confusions that cling to a person as they move through their lives, warping and distorting their original intentions. There is real poignancy in looking back to a time and place where life was still a clean slate, before you find yourself – as Smith does on the closing track, Endsong – looking up at the sky and wondering where you’ve gone. Maybe it does matter if we all die, after all.

When these songs first emerged, on the European leg of 2022’s Shows Of A Lost World tour, the band would open and close their main set the same way: with Alone, its opening line “This is the end of every song we sing,”; and Endsong, which finishes “Left alone with nothing / The end of every song / Nothing.”

The new album follows this sequencing, a kind of dust-to-dust musical palindrome that locks the album into its fate, exits and entrances blocked. Death and disillusionment are hardly unusual Cure elements, but these eight songs have the same concentrated intensity as 1989’s Disintegration, a record similarly preoccupied with broken dreams, ebbing potential, mortality. That record was a product of Smith’s horror at turning 30, then an unimaginable milestone of decay. In 2024, it’s inevitable that falling apart means something very different. “Before I used to write about stuff that I thought I understood,” said Smith in 2019. “Now I know I understand it.”

That year, Smith revealed he had recently lost his father, his mother and his older brother Richard, the latter instrumental in introducing him to Jimi Hendrix and Captain Beefheart and his companion in an earlier musical venture, The Crawley Goat Band. Richard lived in Poland for years; harrowing SOALW song I Can Never Say Goodbye was first played on October 22, 2022, at Krakow’s Tauron Arena. It’s the song at the eye of the album’s emotional storm, Smith singing “Something wicked this way comes / To steal away my brother’s life”.

On a record so alert to the cataclysmic effects of mortality, it’s remarkable how fundamentally unchanged Smith’s voice is, uncracked into a Bob Dylan croak or plunged to new Leonard Cohen depths. Yet there’s no kittenish levity on this record, nothing approaching a pop song – no equivalent of Disintegration’s spidery Lullaby to break the mood. The Never Enough grooves of the spectacular Drone slide closest to a gear-change, but even there, the ground is unsteady. “I’m breaking up again,” sings Smith. Disintegration, in other words, with all its oceanic expanses, its cold glittering light.

Opener Alone is the first station on the album’s audaciously bleak, beautiful journey, inspired by tubercular Victorian poet Ernest Dowson, and his poem Dregs: “The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof / (This is the end of every song man sings!)” It’s a telling addition to Smith’s lace-edged, blood-speckled treasury of Poe, Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

If Alone’s pain is couched in universal terms, And Nothing Lasts Forever comes from a very specific set of circumstances, “a promise I made to someone that I would be with them when they died,” Smith writes in a note sent to reviewers. “But for reasons beyond my control, I didn’t keep that promise. It upset me dreadfully.” There’s a painful, escalating catch in Smith’s phrasing, twisting the opulent backing into something more desperate, the light of an implacable pink moon just detectable in the piano.

Death is at the core of Songs Of A Lost World, but it’s not the only loss. The torrential dialogue of A Fragile Thing rolls in the deepest romantic gloom – “‘Every time you kiss me I could cry,’ she said” – while Warsong, opening with a martial drone reminiscent of Disintegration-era rarity, Pirate Ships, is flooded with deep emotional water.

Another kind of loss explored by SOALW is loss of self, a concept refracted in the crunched-spine funk of Drone: Nodrone, inspired, says Smith, by a drone that flew over his garden, throwing him into a confusion of doubt. Was he being spied on, or not? Smith doesn’t know what to think, and not knowing what to think is almost worse than being watched. Yet it’s also a song about not being sure who you are any more – even if your identity, your image, seems as to be as solid as Smith’s.

All I Ever Am, meanwhile, pushes the rock star towards the nightmare of a “dark and empty stage,” an unfillable void. Smith talks about a “strange feeling of dissociation”, which peaks in Endsong’s grand celestial collapse, recorded around the 50th anniversary of the moon landings and testament to Smith’s life-long stargazing tendencies. “I was outside looking up and back a lot that summer, lamenting age and an increasingly broken world, and always seemed to return to the same two questions; where did that old world go and where did I go?”

Endsong might feel like an asteroid-sized, extinction-event full-stop, but it’s not impossible that The Cure could simply be entering another phase in their remarkable career. The album artwork looks like an ancient stone head, an Atlantis relic, its features so worn away they are barely visible. Yet it’s a 1975 piece by the Slovenian sculptor Janez Pirnat, and the face could just as easily be emerging from the stone as vanishing back into it.

While The Cure are fortunate to have a regenerating fanbase - a generation of fans at 2023 shows who’d never been alive for the real-time release of a new album - the audience who have grown up with them will be staring down the barrel of the same gun as Smith, facing similar griefs, uncertainties, questions. With Songs Of A Lost World, The Cure, often seen as the soundtrack to an eternally doomy adolescence, might just be coming of age.

Songs Of A Lost World is out now on Fiction

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Tracklisting:

Alone

And Nothing Is Forever

A Fragile Thing

Warsong

Drone: Nodrone

I Can Never Say Goodbye

All I Ever Am

Endsong

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