The Cure’s first album in 16 years finds frontman Robert Smith “outside in the dark, wondering how I got so old”. But buoyed by the familiar tidal swirls of reverb-y guitar and battered drums, the 65-year-old goth master’s voice doesn’t sound a day older than it did when he was affecting to be equally world-weary back in his Eighties pomp. Reassuringly, all these years later, he still styles himself like a burned Fraggle and writes songs that claw their way up through the mud to find the aching romance in every doomed thing.
So despite his claim back in 2018 that he’s turning into a “grumpy old man”, Smith still taps into a specific teenage intensity in his music. “Every time you kiss me I could die,” he moans on “A Fragile Thing” in a lipstick smudge of devotion precision-brewed to transport the band’s original fans back to their own youth asking – as he does on opener “Alone” – “where did it go?”
Lost in a haze of spiralling synths on “And Nothing is Forever”, I was spirited back to my own teenage years. Back then I had a friend who was obsessed with The Cure. When I rang the bell of his suburban family home, his mum would roll her eyes and jerk her head towards the stairs. “He’s up there,” she’d say, “wallowing in his own misery.” The sound of Smith’s voice and narcotic guitar seeped out from the crack of his bedroom door like dry ice, actively repelling the wholesome, humdrum smell of the spag bol rising up from the kitchen below. I’d find him – as promised – laid out like a corpse on his bed beneath a poster of the band’s classic 1989 album Disintegration.
There’s nothing quite like a good wallow – and there’s nothing quite like a new Cure album to soundtrack it. Songs of a Lost World is just eight tracks long, although it’s so immersive you’ll lose track of time. The album begins with four minutes of shoegaze instrumental before Smith’s vocals appear in the final third of “Alone” – a disorienting warning at the start of the album that “this is the end… hopes and dreams have gone”.
“Warsong” brings a shanty-ghost of an accordion. There are crunchier, animatronic guitar effects (and a cowbell?) on “Drone:Nodrone” as Smith finds himself “staring down the barrel” and taking “one last shot at happiness” with a squalling headbanger of a guitar solo. There’s a more shimmery effect to the keyboards on “All I Ever Am” and a murky buzz to the guitar hook that puts me in the mind of a giant wasp trapped in a lead coffin.
“Endsong” throws spadeful after spadeful of earth onto the lid of that coffin with its relentless drum battering. At times Smith has written songs of noise and dirge, but here he’s dialled into some lovely melodies, arcing upward, plunging downward and smearing their way into the creases of your brain like mucky kohl – all the while Smith is “staring at the blood red moon, remembering that boy and the world he called his own” and lamenting “it’s all gone, it’s all gone”.
I lost touch with my old friend, but I hope that he’ll have pre-ordered this album. I like to think of him in middle age on his back, still finding the time for a good old wallow in this new wave of seductive musical misery. Nobody does it better.
