The YouTube comments section for “Alone,” The Cure’s new goth-rock epic, is depressing yet strangely hopeful—much like the song itself. Often documenting their advanced ages and saluting late loved ones, so many fans scatter breadcrumbs of grief and healing. “I’m 76 (EEEK). I have lived alone for most of my life (my choice), but so many of the people I cared about are dead,” one person writes. “I have always loved sad songs.”
Robert Smith’s catalog is full of snappy pop melodies and quirky experiments—despite the “goth” tag, not all of his music reaches the frozen-rain downcast of “Alone.” (“The fire burned out to ash, and the stars grown dim with tears,” he sings on this one, over glacial synth pads and gnarled bass. “Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been.”) But it might be the most inspiring mood on his board—for over four decades, through the angst of his voice and most melancholy soundscapes, he’s created sonic cemeteries you visit to feel less alone. And with the absorbing Songs Of A Lost World, The Cure’s first album in 16 years, he’s rarely sounded more in command of that skill.
It took a lot of simmering and experimenting to arrive at this near-masterpiece. Smith’s earliest demos date back to 2010, and the album shed various skins of tone and sequencing—even after 2019, when he first started teasing the project in interviews. (In a nearly two-hour video promo for Lost World, the Cure bandleader says he wound up with three possible albums, with the second of the bunch “virtually finished.” I think I can speak collectively for the fans here: Exciting tidbit, but we won’t hold our breath!) With that kind of delay, it’s easy to fear a certain stiffness and detachment in the songs, the result of endless fussing and workshopping. Instead, Lost World just feels lived-in, its themes of mortality and memory amplified by the sheer scope of the arrangements, which are sculpted into skyscrapers of guitars and keyboards.
The record is bookended by two new-classic Cure songs, peaking in both bleak sadness and meteor-shower splendor. The first, the aforementioned “Alone,” is triumphant yet defeated—like patiently climbing a mountain as you watch the world below you burn. Smith’s visions of dreamworlds and “birds falling out of our skies” don’t enter until halfway through the seven-minute piece—but by then you’re already with him in spirit, frozen by the synth chill and Jason Cooper’s booming kick-snare pattern.
Meanwhile, “Endsong” feels like an extension of that beautiful misery, slow-building into high altitude with the harsh clatter of Cooper’s toms and the echoing screech of Reeves Gabrels’ guitar. Again, Smith arrives deep into the cut, here contrasting his childhood awe at the Apollo 11 landing (“And I’m outside in the dark, staring at the blood red moon / Remembering the hopes and dreams I had”) with a more somber modern-day view (“It’s all gone; it’s all gone / No hopes, no dreams, no world / No, I don’t belong”). There is no magic elixir for this gloom—except, maybe, Gabrels’ untamed wah-wah solo.
That vibe lingers throughout Lost World, as Smith meditates on human beings’ destructive impulses (“Warsong,” highlighted by a hornet’s nest of guitar noise and a vocal echo that distinctly recalls the cinematic productions of Wall-era Pink Floyd), the delicate nature of romantic love (the comparably upbeat and hooky “A Fragile Thing”), and, frequently, on the permanence of death (the twinkling “I Can Never Say Goodbye” was inspired by the passing of his older brother Richard).
But as usual with Smith at his saddest, you don’t leave his orbit feeling worse about the world. You feel comforted by the fact that someone shares this universal pain so deeply.
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