The Cure
Songs Of A Lost World

Singular beasts, The Cure.

Just as singular was their entrance into the life and listening habits of the author of this piece.

Throughout the early 2000s, it was improbable to think of leafing through a single music magazine without encountering the name of Robert Smith's creation under the “declared influences” category for the band on the cover.

Blink-182 and AFI, Deftones and Linkin Park, Placebo and Alkaline Trio, Korn and Marilyn Manson, and so on — all so different from each other yet all united by the same influence. How was that possible? There was nothing left to do but investigate it on one's own.

Imagine the surprise of a fourteen-year-old discovering that “The Lovecats” from The Cure’s catalog was used as the theme for a - not particularly successful, hence remembered by few - children’s TV program, or that the imaginative soundtrack of a Candy commercial was none other than “Pictures Of You.”

Two songs, two tones, two completely different souls.

Just like “A Forest,” a post-hangover “Boys Don’t Cry.” Or like “A Letter To Elise,” the paranoia following the romantic awkwardness of “Why Can’t I Be You?”

In short, mastering The Cure's discography required a lot of patience.

But it was appropriate to take years to do so because The Cure took even longer to fall back in love with their music.

At the time of “4:13 Dream” — an impressive sixteen years ago — the Earth had nearly two billion fewer people, and it might not be an exaggeration to claim that Smith and his peers have everything it takes to become one of the favorite bands for some of them, even if they don't know it yet.

Whether whistling along to "Friday I’m In Love" on a passing radio while returning home from school or spending the evening at the bottom of a bottle to the notes of “Disintegration,” The Cure always have something perfectly fitting to accompany the moment.

And finally, in a fast-paced world that consumes music and hits like sushi boxes ordered on Glovo, the former three imaginary boys even challenge death by returning with “Songs Of A Lost World.”

Written, often declared to be nearing release, and recorded over the last decade while certain ghosts hovered along the dark corridors of mourning for the loss of Robert's parents and older brother, their return to the scene has paradoxically risked relegating them — artistically speaking — to the imperfect tense of the verb ‘to be.’

We are facing The Cure’s darkest work since “Disintegration,” an album seemingly designed to echo its glacial rhythm and introspective nature, yet it is not a self-inflicted effort by a declining band repeating its greatest hits. Instead, it feels like a fruit patiently waited to be picked, a library carefully assembled, a collection passionately completed. It is the awareness of maturity.

“Alone” opens the tracklist with symphonic elegance, entrusting an epic production and its three-minute introduction with the task of painting a sky heavy with clouds over a sea ready to foam over everything it can.

“This is the end of every song we sing”

Robert Smith impacts beautifully, illuminated by that aura of eternity belonging to someone who has never been young.

There are still pop arrows in the quiver, as in “A Fragile Thing,” where Smith comes to terms with the fact that although love is “everything”, there’s “nothing you can do to change the end”.

There are still the Arabic glows of the luckier albums, perfectly mixed with the metallic screech of guitars from the 'Robinson-ian' phase, as in “Warsong.”

There is, of course, Simon Gallup.

And here we must be categorical: if Smith embodies the heart and soul of his own project, Gallup — also, but not only — as the longest-serving comrade, is essentially the brains, adept at managing transitions between the different emotional registers of the former, even within the same track.

“Drone: Nodrone” represents a great performance in this regard. Now rhythmical, pounding, crushing, now anthemic, overflowing, titanic.

There is the lyricism that made The Cure great: “And Nothing Is Forever” arises from a series of very specific circumstances, a promise made to someone to be there when they were about to die, but which, for reasons beyond one’s control, couldn’t be honored.

Can you believe it?

An entire career spent romanticizing the end and then, when the end becomes real, missing it.

Here, the comparison with “Disintegration” holds, the product of Smith’s reflections on turning 30, then an unimaginable milestone of decay.

In 2024, it is inevitable that falling apart means something very different. “At first, I was writing about things I thought I understood,” he declared in 2019, “now I know I understand them.”

And when the 10:24 minutes of “Endsong” roll down the curtain on “Songs Of A Lost World,” you can breathe in its essence:

“Alone, with nothing / At the end of every song”

The album’s last verse closes a circle opened with the first, a dark cycle that captures the seemingly perpetual process of grief.

It’s been a luxury to witness firsthand, rather than arrive belatedly at, the release of two of their albums, and it’s been enlightening to watch from the outside the exchange of opinions among longtime fans about what is the best 'afterWish'.

But if it’s true that — quoting John Keats — “beauty is truth, truth is beauty,” and if it’s true that today we more than ever have an urgency for truth, then we also need someone who can look into the abyss for us, scrutinize it, embellish it.

And write us songs.

Songs of a better world.