Ever since the release of 2008’s “4:13 Dream,” the Cure has spent all its time performing onstage and trawling through its own archives. Along with a relentless concert schedule, there have been remixes and live recordings and retrospective releases – but no new album.
All those years of dimly lit doom and gloom seemingly made the light of day too much to bear, as if pondering what was next was too much. But after 16 years without an album of new material, the Cure is back with “Songs of a Lost World,” a work of Goth grandeur that gazes into the existential void and ponders the end of not just the band, but everything.
For decades, the Cure has oscillated between its poppier aspirations and the downcast Goth rock that it helped establish in the ’80s. “Songs of a Lost World” leans fully into the darkness with wall-of-sound production that demonstrates the ouroboros of influence: Cure descendants like My Bloody Valentine and Nine Inch Nails loom large in the mental mix.
The album is awash waves of wiry guitar riffs, warm synth pads, the echoes of familiar piano chords and – as if evoking the sounds of an earlier, analogue era – the sludginess of melted vinyl and a finger pushing down on cassette tape. “Songs of a Lost World” is an album for meditation under black light.
It is also patient. Half of its songs are longer than six minutes, with one topping 10, and it takes nearly three minutes for front man Robert Smith to set the album’s tone with its first lyric: “This is the end of every song that we sing.”
Smith – who is the only credited songwriter on a Cure album for the first time since 1985’s “The Head on the Door” – is 65 years old and has been in the band for nearly five decades. For any artist at his age, pondering the end would be natural; for a gothic bard like Smith, “Songs of a Lost World” is the apotheosis of a career-long fascination with disintegration.
Amid the “blood red moons” and “cold black rain” of Smith’s haunted poetry are solemn soliloquies about the time, memory and dreams that make up a person, and what happens when the stars grow dim and a “broken-voiced lament” calls us home. Even years spent morbidly fixated has not prepared him for what’s next. “I’m trying to make some sense of it,” he admits. “I can’t anymore, if I ever really could.” (Sorry, young goths: It Doesn’t Get Better.)
Smith’s lyrical focus and baroque songcraft make “Songs of a Lost World” the band’s best album since its 1989 masterpiece “Disintegration” (even if listeners seeking a “Lovesong” or “Pictures of You” will be left wanting). And despite Smith teasing at least one more album, it would also be a fitting end point for the Cure. After a half century of searching in the shadows for answers about love, life and death, Smith has seemingly found what he was looking for … whether that provides any solace or not.
“I’m outside in the dark, wondering how I got so old,” he sings on the appropriately titled closer, “Endsong.” “No, I don’t belong here anymore.”