The Cure’s ‘Songs of a Lost World’ review: All 8 songs ranked

“And Nothing is Forever” is perhaps the most conventionally beautiful track on the album, with its gentle opening passage of plaintive piano chords and sweeping synth strings. But conventional beauty has never really been what Cure does best. The song is so slow that it’s a positive funeral, which is fitting given the lyrics.

“‘And Nothing is Forever’ is about a promise I made to someone who was very sick that I would be with them when they died. And I wasn’t. And because I wasn’t, I wrote the song,” Smith explained in a 100-minute video interview released two weeks before the album. The Cure has long favored long instrumental intros — consider how “Fascination Street” established a groove for over two minutes before Smith opened his mouth. . Songs from a Lost Worldhowever, it takes the approach to new extremes, with several songs saving all the lyrics for the second half of the track.

Bassist Simon Gallup is the longest-tenured Cure member besides Robert Smith – he’s been with the band since 1979, with the exception of 18 months in the mid-80s, and a strange 2-month stretch of 2021, when he announced , and then went back, another departure from Kuren. Gallup’s booming basslines have always been an important part of the Cure’s signature sound, but his heavily distorted bass is front and center in the mix on Songs from a Lost World like never before.

That’s really nailed down on “All I Ever Am,” which features Gallup playing a very catchy tune that would probably have been played on piano on an ’80s Cure album. Much of the album will already be familiar to fans who saw the Cure on their Shows of a Lost World tour in 2023. However, “All I Ever Am” was one of three songs not previewed on the tour, along with ” Warsong” and “Drone:Nodrone.”

“Endsong” is one of two song titles on The lost worldalong with “Warsong” which instantly brings to mind “Plainsong” and “Lovesong” from Disintegrationwith the latter being the Cure’s biggest US chart hit, reaching No. 2 on the Hot 100. Clocking in at over 10 minutes, “Endsong” is the second-longest studio track in the Cure catalog, bested only by 2000’s 11-minute “Watching Me Fall” ‘ers Blood flowers. A tambourine and drum machine handclaps give “Endsong” a more polyrhythmic churn than the rest of the album, as the track slowly builds to Smith’s vocals, which arrive more than six minutes into the song.

“Endsong” certainly feels like it could be a curtain call for the Cure’s entire career, but that’s not Smith’s plan. In his interview to promote the album, Smith revealed that the band is working on two more new albums, one of which is “pretty much done.”

“Alone” has opened virtually every Cure concert since 2022, and in September it became the first new Cure studio track released in over a decade. What’s most striking about the song, and what sent ripples of excitement through the Cure’s diehard fanbase, is how little the 7-minute track sounds like a lead single. “Alone” is a strong statement of intent that the album is for the fans, not radio programmers. There’s a brutal physicality to the way Jason Cooper, the Cure’s drummer since 1995, bangs his snare drum and tom-toms on “Alone,” but it’s a stately and graceful song with a haunting descending triplet figure played on piano and guitar.

American guitarist Reeves Gabrels is best known for the distinctive phrasing and screeching leads of his work with Davie Bowie and Tin Machine, and his sound was very recognizable the first time he played on a Cure song, 1997’s “Wrong Number.” Gabrels is considerably more restrained on most Songs from a Lost Worldthe first album since he became a full member of the Cure in 2012. The most notable exception is his wild, dissonant lead guitar on “Drone:Nodrone.” That’s an outlier on Songs from a Lost World: the most uptempo song, as well as the only lyrics that exist fully in the modern world, with Smith raging at surveillance technology after seeing a drone fly over his house.

Smith says he wrote “Warsong” about “someone I fell out with, made up, fell out with” and the conflict inherent in human relationships. Considering that over a dozen musicians have played in the Cure over the past few decades, many of them leaving and returning, there’s really no telling exactly who the song is about. At 4 minutes and 17 seconds, “Warsong” would have been the longest song on the Cure’s 1979 debut Three imaginary boysbut here it is the shortest course. “I want your death, you want my life” is perhaps the album’s best example of the kind of devastatingly pithy and dramatic lyrics for which Smith is known and loved.

Both of Robert Smith’s parents and his brother Richard died in the 2010s. And the sense of grief and loss that hangs ominously over Songs from a Lost World felt most profoundly on “I Can Never Say Goodbye”, which was written about Richard’s unexpected death. At one point Smith sings “Something wicked this way comes”, a phrase coined by Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Macbeth. “I Can Never Say Goodbye” opens with reminiscent rain sound effects Disintegration fans of “The Same Deep Water as You”.

Songs from a Lost World‘s second single is the only time on the album that Smith sings in the first minute of the song – just barely, at the 50-second mark. It’s also his strongest vocal performance on the album, with multi-tracked harmonies on the chorus. When an aging artist releases a new album, the first thing that strikes you is often how time has changed their voice. However, Smith, 65, sounds remarkably identical to Smith, 25, especially when his voice expressly cracks on the word “regret.”