The Cure – Songs of a Lost World | soundsfromthedarkside

The Cure - Songs of a Lost World After sixteen long years, The Cure is back with a new studio album and so, we review.

Songs of a Lost World is a depressing album. Of course British goth icons The Cure never were a very uplifting bunch, but this new album, the first in sixteen years, is a particularly bleak affair. The title itself, Songs of a Lost World, says enough in that respect. It’s an introspective, moody and very ambient work that will take your senses hostage for almost fifty minutes. It is the end of every song we sing.

We all know The Cure. We’ve all heard Lullabye, A Forest and Friday I’m in Love, a song I’ve weirdly have never heard being played on any radio station on any particular Friday (just like The Bangles’ Manic Monday or The Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays on a Monday, for that matter). This is not that The Cure. I remember seeing them live with my father on the Torhout/Werchter festival in Belgium all the way back in 1995. My father hated The Cure with a particular passion and, in my defence, I was an angsty teenager, fifteen years old, who came along for Therapy? and The Offspring. We both slept through The Cure’s set, laying on the grass in the warm summer sun. My old man would have been mightily annoyed to learn that Songs of a Lost World is one of my musical highlights of the year.

It’s an amazing thing. Songs of a Lost World flows wonderfully and Robert Smith hasn’t lost any of his vocal gusto and passion. The album is slow, brooding and dark and, for Smith, a deeply personal one after having lost both his parents and his brother in recent years. Having lost both my father and my mother (a huge The Cure fan herself) as well recently, I Can Never Say Goodbye, which Smith has written about his mother, really hits home. It’s an emotional record.

Musically, Songs of a Lost World is a strange form of sedated dream-pop, for lack of a better description. It meanders and flows and takes you on a melancholy journey that is first and foremost heavy on synths and bass. It’s contemplative with its long intros, sometimes taking up to three minutes before Smith’s vocals kick in, but never not impressive. And Nothing Is Forever is almost seven minutes long and has a three-minute lead-in before there are any lyrics, and it’s a wonderful lead-in that will invoke emotion even before the words hit. And they hit hard, because Robert Smith is right. Nothing is forever and yes, our world has grown old. But it really matter if you’re together. Promise you’ll be with me in the end. It’s as grim as it’s romantic.

Other highlights include the almost industrial sounding Warsong and A Fragile Thing, which is basically the only thing that approaches the sort of radio friendly pop fluff that most people know The Cure for. Not that they’d play it on mainstream radio anyway; let’s do A Forest again. Songs of a Lost World ends on a haunting note with Endsong. We’re outside in the dark, wondering how we got so old and all is gone. Left alone with nothing at the end of every song. Reaching the end of things; finality heralded by haunting keys and militaristic drumming.

Songs of a Lost World is a bleak, surreal, dreamy and grim album and I will rank it all the way up with The Cure’s best work. It won’t yeet Disintegration from the top spot but it’s very bloody close. It’s a memorable, haunting record that will rightly end up in a lot of lists at the end of 2024, and we can only be thankful that the band is still around and able to give us something this good.

Label: Universal Records

Buy it here: https://thecure.lnk.to/SongsOfALostWorld

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