Ever since their second album release, Seventeen Seconds, way back in 1980, The Cure and let’s face it, main songwriter Robert Smith, have been showing how gracefully the goth rock sound can age. There have been a few duds in terms of material after the year 2000, but for this latest album, Songs of a Lost World—their 14th studio album and second comeback—The Cure (and in this case Smith, since he was the sole composer) have gone back to the basics; that gloomy romantic goth rock sound that they helped cultivate to inspire a legion of other bands. And the result is glorious.
The music is fresh and usually simple, playing off that darkened heavy reverb drone that makes goth rock so memorable. And these songs are so over the top, donning black makeup for the world to feel and remember, like a deranged musical where everyone is crying. I urge you to listen to a song like “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” and tell me you don’t feel something.
The lyrics are on point with super personal, yet vague, but not too vague stories from Smith, and the instrumentation puts us right back in the madness of a song like the 1980s “A Forest,” but still feels quite contemporary and new. We begin with a momentous synthy dark build during the song “Alone,” before Robert finally chimes in with the heavy vocal phrase “This is End, / Of Every Song That We Sing,” which I believed to be completely true until learning that Smith is indeed writing another album for The Cure. Still, the vocals hit and Smith sounds as charismatic and full as he did in his 20s.
Truly, if you took a song like “A Fragile Thing” and played it next to a song like “Pictures Of You,” it would be hard to differentiate their release dates even though they are 35 years apart. Smith might actually be the only singer whose voice has never actually changed. And The Cure just released a live album for Songs of a Lost World if you want even more proof. Smith is untouchable and we’re lucky he’s still choosing to make music. This album will be a hard one to follow up, but I have no doubt Smith is ready for the challenge.
