Songs of a Lost World

Have the Cure ever been truly young? Even as teenagers in England’s punk era, there was something suspiciously adult about this darkly elegant band from Crawley, who favored introspective Saturday nights at home, listening to dripping taps while keeping their tear ducts firmly buttoned up.

Perhaps this is why maturity suits the band so well. It has been 16 years (and two Kate Bush albums) since the last Cure LP and three decades since their last hit song. And yet Robert Smith & co. keep plodding on magnificently in a world of three-hour concerts, forever following their muse, free of the wearying obligations that face the next bright young things. Now, at last, they return with Songs of a Lost World, an album clearly uninterested in making up time after its prolonged gestation, and content to move at its own unhurried pace.

Of course, the Cure have had moments of giddy and joy over their four decades of life. But Songs of a Lost World has no gorgeously silly love songs like “The Lovecats”; no blood-pumping pop rushes like “Just Like Heaven”; no barrelling psychedelic jaunts like “The Caterpillar,” and no attempt to engage with the two billion-odd people born since the band last released an album. Nothing here—bar, perhaps, the riffy strut of “Drone:Nodrone,” a song of steely, gothic funk—raises the tempo beyond a stroll or threatens to push the temperature beyond a cold sweat. Instead, the Cure sound deliciously slow, elegantly weary, and definitively grown up on their 14th studio album.

Songs of a Lost World may be going nowhere fast, but that doesn’t mean it’s going nowhere. “Alone,” the opening song, is an object lesson in the way rock music can age gracefully. Reeves Gabrels’ gloriously jagged guitar pulls at the hair of Jason Cooper’s stadium drum thump while ethereal keyboard lines keep gentle watch. It’s an epic, thunderclouds-over-the-mountaintop production that shuns the callous energy of youth in favor of sober reflection, wrapped up in a beautifully pensive chord progression. When Robert Smith finally steps to the mic, three minutes in, and proclaims, “This is the end/Of every song that we sing,” it feels apocalyptically right, like the odd comfort of having your worst fear realized.

The droney, Nico-esque intro of “Warsong” aside, you’d be hard pressed to spot many moments where the Cure push themselves musically. Simon Gallup’s bass lines are uniformly tough and low slung, bringing the same rugged drive he has delivered on and off since 1979; Cooper’s drums have the juddering, tom-led intensity of Lol Tolhurst’s work on Pornography; and the ghostly synth melodies on “Alone” and “Endsong” suggest the magical melancholia of “All Cats Are Grey,” from 1981’s Faith. Gabrels, the new boy of the band, with only 12 years of service, comes closest to breaking new ground, although his feedback and fuzz on “Warsong” and the tortured wah-wah on “Drone:Nodrone” inevitably remind the listener how much the shoegaze bands borrowed from the Cure in the first place.

Unlike, say, the Rolling Stones in 2024, today’s Cure don’t profess any need to prove their vitality or relevance. And why should they? It sometimes feels like we all eventually become the Cure, as the band’s eternal—and initially precocious—preoccupations about mortality, aging, and doubt inevitably drip into our lives as we get older and frailer. And if we are to bend to the Cure, then why should the Cure bend to us? The band has carved out its own sound—gothic, epic, and yet strangely minimal—and earned the right to remain there. Songs of a Lost World feels thick and important, a giant oak tree of an album that towers over everything it surveys. Every element counts—every plucked bass string, rolling drum fill, angry guitar strum, or gentle piano note feels vital.

Songs of a Lost World may not be a vast step up in quality from the highlights of Bloodflowers, 4:13 Dream, or whatever your favorite is of the band’s post-Wish records. (Opinions vary wildly.) But it feels like a record whose time is right, delivering a concentrated dose of the Cure and cutting the fat that dogged their later albums. The album’s eight songs bring sharply potent tales of death (“I Can Never Say Goodbye” is about the unexpected passing of Smith’s older brother Richard); mortality (the beautiful “And Nothing Is Forever”); and the difficulty of being in the present moment (“All I Ever Am”). Smith’s voice is still a remarkable instrument of release after all these years, and his best couplets (“And the birds, falling out of our skies/And the words, falling out of our minds,” from “Alone”) remain marvels of economy and craft.

Songs of a Lost World feels at times like David Bowie’s own great reflection on mortality, Blackstar, although the Cure take few of the stylistic risks that he did. Much as in Bowie’s later years, it has often felt like a new Cure album would never arrive, the band’s momentum fatally stalled by the indecision of the 2000s. But perhaps the greatest compliment to pay Songs of a Lost World is that it already feels inevitable, a work of wisdom and grace that extends naturally from the moment the Cure took up their instruments in a local church hall all those years ago.

The Cure: Songs of a Lost World

$37 at Rough Trade

$33 at Amazon