False starts and false promises: The turbulent journey to The Cure’s first album in 16 years

From the smeared red lips of rock’s foremost man of murk came a solemn promise. “Have we recorded any more songs?” asked Robert Smith, lounged on a studio sofa in his inky black finery. “We might have done. We may well have recorded 32 songs and I fully intend to release part two of this project within the next six months.” The only thing holding back the 14th Cure album, he explained, was record label red tape.

The year was 2008 and, in an East Sussex recording studio decked out like a haunted forest, Smith and I were conducting the only promotional interview for that year’s new Cure record 4:13 Dream – a follow-up to their self-titled release four years earlier. For the band’s legions of dark, devoted fans, the revelation that 4:13 Dream was the first half of a double album (a doomier sister-piece forthcoming) was like hearing that Da Vinci had also done a Mona Larry he just had to fetch from the shed.

As a band who mastered the balance of accessible indie rock and pop hits (“The Lovecats”, “In Between Days”, “Why Can’t I Be You?”, “Friday I’m in Love”) with soul-scouring monuments of atmospheric exorcism and glacial enormity, The Cure are behind some of alt-rock’s most seminal output. Take the “goth trilogy” of Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982). Or their intoxicating statement records like 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1992’s Wish, and 1989’s glowering masterpiece Disintegration. And now their own version of Guns N’ Roses’ dual album behemoths Use Your Illusion I and II? It was too good to be true.

Six months later, the second half of 4:13 Dream failed to materialise. Six years on, in 2014, there was word of two outtake albums, 4.14 Scream and a double called 4.26 Dream, but neither of those emerged either. Little did Cure fans know, the band were in the beginnings of one of the longest and most frustrating creative silences since My Bloody Valentine fanatics had to wait 22 years for a follow-up to 1991’s shoegaze benchmark Loveless.

Making Kate Bush’s output look like the Now! series, Smith took 16 years to release his 14th studio album, this week’s Songs of a Lost World. The consensus is, it was worth the wait. Far from being a dated drag through the past decade-plus of shifting alternative styles, the album beautifully remodels The Cure’s core aesthetic – stalking crepuscular rock, galactic glistening, storm-in-limbo cataclysm – for the earthy yet synthetic modern age. Opener “Alone” marries warping nu-shoegaze clatter to crackling antique strings. “Warsong” is as grungy and sludgy as any of PJ Harvey’s ancient battlefields. “Drone: No Drone” is The Cure’s classic intense electro rock given a surveillance era update, while “And Nothing is Forever”, a song about a promise Smith made to be with someone on their deathbed, unfolds from its gossamer piano intro into a sonic corridor of light.

It’s also a record on which Smith philosophically matures. His trademark angst and despair are tempered by the sedative of experience. He picks out the celebration and nobility in death, the foolishness in warfare, the fragility in love and, on “I Can Never Say Goodbye”, the cruel grind in grief.

So what took so long? According to Smith’s recent filmed interview with 6 Music’s Matt Everitt, whatever wrangles scuppered the release of Songs of a Lost World seem to have left him with no pressing interest in further studio endeavours. “I don’t think there was really an official beginning to this album because it’s been kind of drifting in and out of my life for an awful long time,” he said. “There are various points where I thought, ‘I think we’re going to make a new album.’ And then… other things have happened and the idea’s been pushed back.”

Instead, without a record deal to rush them along, the band concentrated on live activity, playing a series of Reflections shows in 2011 – full run-throughs of their first three albums in a single night – and several festival tours with new guitarist Reeves Gabrels of Tin Machine infamy. It was only the approach of the band’s 40th anniversary in 2018, marked by Smith curating the annual Meltdown festival and playing Hyde Park as part of the British Summer Time shows, that raised the prospect of one final studio blow-out.

open image in gallery

“I was thinking we’ll do something that sums up what the band is and where we’ve got to,” Smith said of a record he began writing in 2017. “It was a grand plan and grand plans generally don’t work very well in my experience. It wasn’t really being done for the right reasons.”

Smith envisioned the band’s 40th celebrations as a good point to end The Cure. “I thought every moment from this point on is pretty much a bonus,” he said. “I thought that the Hyde Park show would be it – that that was the end of The Cure… It was only because it was such a great day with such a great response and I enjoyed it so much, and we got a flood of offers to headline every European festival [including] Glastonbury, [I thought] maybe it’s not the right time to stop.”

The 2018 anniversary album inevitably failed to materialise. Instead, in 2019, Smith announced that The Cure had been recording some of the tracks in one of the studios where Queen had recorded “Bohemian Rhapsody”. “We recorded 25, 26 songs,” he told Everitt. “We recorded three albums in 2019. That’s always been the problem because I’ve been trying to get three albums completed. My idea was this – after waiting this long, let’s just throw out Cure albums every few months.”

open image in gallery

A confident Smith hinted at a Halloween drop date: “I feel intent on it being a 2019 release and would be extremely bitter if it isn’t,” he told NME at the time. But his mouth was writing cheques that his schedule couldn’t cash. “If I have one regret it’s that I said anything at all about it in 2019,” he told Everitt today. “I really shouldn’t have done, because we only just started creating it.” Yet the extra time taken allowed him to evolve the idea of the album away from a summary celebration of an arbitrary year. “[It became] much more natural,” he said, “much more artistic.”

During lockdown, Smith spent time reading voraciously – War and Peace, every John le Carré – and listening to demos of discarded songs from earlier sessions recorded as far back as 1991. Tracks begun in 2010, 2011 and 2013 were added to the pot and Songs of a Lost World began to find a firmer outline. Key to the cohesion was finding a beginning and end to the record. “Alone” was inspired by the 1902 poem “Dregs” by Ernest Dowson and “Endsong” by a starlit night that reminded Smith of a similar evening in 1969, stargazing in the back garden with his father when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

“I remembered the feeling of, like, ‘I didn’t believe it’,” he said. “I grew up in the glorious 30 years from the end of the Second World War – the world that I was born into was getting incrementally better every year. It just seemed that the world was on an upward trajectory and the moon landing was part of that. And around the time I turned 16 in ’75, it seemed like the world sort of stalled and it’s been travelling down ever since.”

In June 2021, Smith began talking in the press about two new albums in the pipeline, completed bar the mixing. “One of them’s very, very doom and gloom and the other one isn’t,” he told Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe; in May 2022 he promised that the first would come out ahead of that October’s European tour (it didn’t). The doom-and-gloom one was Songs of a Lost World – though, over the coming three years, it developed a brighter aspect.

“I was imagining [with] this album, everything was going to be relentlessly downbeat,” he said, “and then a few people who I trust listened to it and said…‘It’s too much, you can’t expect people to listen to this much doom and gloom.’” As six songs were trialled on tour and tinkered with in the studio afterwards, Smith subsequently trimmed the album down from 13 tracks to eight and replaced some of the bleaker tracks. “It is a much better record for it,” he concluded, “because it has a bit of light and dark.”

Announced in as low-key a manner as possible – with cryptic postcards to fans and a single poster placed outside the Crawley pub where The Cure played their earliest shows – that Songs of a Lost World is here at all is a minor miracle of aligning stars, foiled endings and unabating inspiration. It’s a record that, itself, refused to be lost. And though Smith claims to have two more albums almost ready to release (fool us once, etcetera) before he plans to retire the band when he reaches 70 years old in 2029, Songs of a Lost World would work wonderfully as a forlorn final word from The Cure. Particularly since the austere, 10-minute “Endsong” closes with Smith’s entire world dissolving into a nihilistic blackness: “I will lose myself in time/ no hopes, no dreams, no world… left alone with nothing at the end of every song,” he wails. “Nothing, nothing, nothing”.

‘Songs of a Lost World’ is out on 1 November via Fiction/Polydor