Songs of a Lost World

It’s nearly here…

No one thought there’d be a new Cure album. Not even their leader, singer Robert Smith. Since their last record came out in 2008, he’s repeatedly made comments preparing hungry fans for the fact that, though they have continued to play live pretty consistently, their recorded output was almost certainly done. He’d only do another record, he said, if he felt there was one that needed to be made, rather than just doing one for the sake of doing one. He continually reminded us that as the members of the group got older, less and less of their time was consumed by The Cure, and more and more in their other life.

He’s said stuff like this before. Disintegration was going to be their last record, in 1989. Then Bloodflowers was ‘the band’s swansong’, and them ‘bowing out on a high’. It even had two songs alluding to that - Maybe Someday was all about looking back on a career that was over (in my opinion, anyway, there are other ways of reading the song) and ‘39’ was all about the creative well having finally run dry. So that was definitely it. But Bloodflowers was then followed by two further albums, with four years between them.

But then? We waited, and waited, and four years became eight became twelve and I personally stopped waiting. Not because I didn’t want there to be another Cure record, but because I believed that this time it was true, it was over, there never would be. And I wasn’t complaining. Thirteen full length albums, many of them doubles. Hundreds of songs, many of them classics. Every single musical style (bar only a few, and with a remix of Picture of You they even, technically, did reggae), all moods from euphoric pop (Inbetween Days, Friday I’m in Love) to intense, soul-searing emotion (Disintegration, One Hundred Years, Pornography). If they never recorded another note, there was still plenty there.

But then something happened. In 2018 Smith curated London’s Meltdown festival. And in doing so, he said he’d started to listen to more new music, get inspired to write once more. Then we heard keyboardist Roger had told him the band needed to do one more record, and that it should be the most intense, the darkest, most Cure-like they’d ever done. And then…

Then Smith said they’d been in the studio, and recorded hours of music, and it was indeed bleak and intense, and there were no pop songs, and it was the best thing they’d done and the darkest thing since Pornography, which came out in 1982. And because this version of The Cure, the intense, emotional, soaring version, is my favourite, I became very excited.

It was going to be out before the anniversary of their first record, so it’d be 2019, Smith said. Then that date came and went. Definitely 2020. But then nothing, in that weird pandemic year, apart from rumours that he was tinkering, was struggling to get the words right, having admitted that there’s only so many times he can sing about the same emotions and writing ‘intellectually’ about other stuff, that he wasn’t feeling or never had, wasn’t for him. Then 2021 saw the announcement, not of the record, but of a tour to promote it, in December 2022. So it’d be out by then! It even had a title, Songs of a Lost World.

Only it wasn’t. I went to the shows, they played some AMAZING new songs, but no new record. Next year, 2023, surely?

But no. Nothing. Reissues of old albums, remastered with new tracks, but no new album. Rumours stared. There was no new record or it was tied up in legal issues or he’d decided it wasn’t good enough after all.

We went into 2024 starting to think the live versions of the new songs (which are on YouTube in pretty good quality) was all we were going to get. Or I did, anyway. On the one hand, as a fifty-something year old man with a life, it didn’t bother me. God knows I know the pain of creating something, and how much it can take from you, and if Smith’d decided it hadn’t been worth it, or the record wasn’t good enough to add to their pretty impressive legacy, then who was I to moan? But the other, larger, part of me, was DESPERATE for new Cure music.

I’ve loved them for so long. Ever since a friend at school gave me a tape of their singles collection, Standing on a Beach. I’ve seen them countless times. They have so many songs that mean so much to me, including a whole album, Disintegration, which I wrote about in the post below.

It was greedy of me to want more, but I did. And Smith was describing it using words like ‘punishing’ and ‘relentless’ and ‘intense’ and that’s my bag, so I was even more excited by the new record. But was he teasing us, again, as he had with the famed 4:14 Scream, a companion record to 4:13 Dream which never came out?

But then? A couple of weeks ago their website went down, replaced only with a new logo and a signup link. Band members shared on their social with the hashtag #SongsOfALostWorld. Was it really happening?

Some fans got postcard, all black, embossed with the album title and roman numerals, I-XI-MMXXIV. Posters went up, most notably outside the venue the band played their first ever show. It was happening, wasn’t it?

And now, ten minutes ago, I just heard the first single and opening track, Alone, on BBC6 music. And as the song opened with a swell of keyboard, it started to rain. The Cure are back, and I’m happy.

Here it is. Alone.