LOST AND FOUND

There is something arresting, imposing, and unexpectedly grand about The Cure’s fourteenth studio album. Songs Of A Lost World is sombre but never dreary, serious but not preachy, crafted yet projecting a determined immediacy. It is, in sum, a very fine Cure album indeed. 

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Recording commenced at the famous Rockfield studios in Wales back in 2019, with the album finally hitting the shelves on 1st November 2024. All the songs are by Robert Smith, his meticulous approach to recording contributing to the decidedly sedate five year production process. The record also marks the first studio appearance of guitarist Reeves Gabrels who joined the band in 2012 after a lengthy association with David Bowie (the Tin Machine studio albums and four Bowie solo releases between 1993 and 1999). Gabrels contribution is significant, his atmospheric swirls setting the tone of the album from the first moments of the opening song, "Alone." He is versatile, too. A driving saw-toothed guitar squall underpins "Drone: Nodrone", the powerful song leading off side two. Yet this is far from a guitar album. The Cure’s love of keyboards remains prominent, with some lovely piano parts thrown into the mix as well. 

The melancholy keening of Smith’s voice is the dominant emotional wind, consistent with the songs’ lyrics. Always one to look towards existential themes, the singer/songwriter was buffeted in that direction by life events during the half-decade of the album’s gestation. COVID smashed his extended family, claiming "all my remaining aunties and uncles." Perhaps more painfully, his brother’s death had a profound impact. In "I can never say goodbye" Smith sings, 

Something wicked this way comes

From out the cruel and treacherous night

Something wicked this way comes

To steal away my brother’s life.

Mixing in the universal experience of ageing and our own fragile flesh, it adds up to a work that will certainly please those who have resonated with the Cure’s existential angst across the decades. 

Robert Smith spares neither himself nor us. The opening verse of the album’s first song ("Alone") lays it out:

This is the end

Of every song that we sing

The fire burned out to ash

And the stars grown dim with tears.

The titles that follow—"And nothing is forever", "A fragile thing", "All I ever am"—focus on connection/loneliness, the transience of life and our inevitable shortcomings and failings. The tunnel of loss leads only to a deeper darkness. Closing track "Endsong" hammers this preoccupation home like a velvet piledriver:

I’m outside in the dark

His benediction is a mournful ashes to ashes reminder:

Left alone with nothing

Nothing

Nothing

Musically, the sombre arrangements shadow the lyrical concerns, but never bombastically. Yes, the tempos are mostly slow and the sound powerful (anchored by Simon Gallup’s bass and the drums of Jason Cooper) but the determined immediacy referred to earlier provides a tidal surge to keeps things moving, albeit at a measured, inexorable pace. And that’s The Cure, really. Progressing through life, confronting ages and stages just like the rest of us. Younger fans come on board, recognising something potently universal in the music; older followers nod their heads, ruefully, gratefully. Because in the end all we have is ourselves, and each other.

© Bruce Jenkins—March 2025