Thoughts on The Cure's Songs of a Lost World
The Cure’s new album, Songs of a Lost World, arrives 16 years after their last one, the tepidly-received 4:13 Dream. This gap between albums has meant that—for several generations of music fans coming of age online—the band that Robert Smith started in Crawley, West Sussex in 1976 when he was 17 has been close to a non-concern. In that interim period, The Cure has perhaps appeared on lists of canonical best albums with their 1989 masterpiece, Disintegration, and in goth memes, but, otherwise, the band has felt thoroughly consigned to the past.
This all changed when Songs of a Lost World’s first single, “Alone,” was released at the end of September. Like many tracks on the LP, the song opens with a lengthy instrumental intro—in this case around ~3:21—before Smith’s ageless voice enters, intoning,
This is the end of every song that we sing
The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears
Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we've been
We toast with bitter dregs, to our emptiness
Thematically, this sense of desolation from the album’s opening stanza permeates nearly its entire 50-minute runtime. Smith is now 65 and, across 2019 alone, he experienced the loss of an influential older brother and both parents. He has also referred to having “lost the entire older generation of [his] family … in the first few months of COVID” in interviews during this press cycle.
While longtime Cure fans will be quick to point out that Smith’s work has often taken up themes of death and emotional extremity, I would argue that there is a newfound gravity to both his writing and his baritone on Songs of a Lost World. Themes and affects from earlier in The Cure’s discography are taken up again on the new record, but they are now charged with a newfound perspective that is the product of Smith’s lived experience. Another way of stating this would be simply to claim that Songs of a Lost World is a work of late style.
The concept of “late style” was most notably theorized by Theodor Adorno and Edward Said, and, essentially, it amounts to how we interpret the later works of great artists. Though Adorno was writing about Beethoven, “late style” has, more recently, been taken up in analyses of popular music, as significant figures in twentieth-century pop music are now reaching old age and, in many regrettable cases, passing away. According to Amir Cohen-Shalev,
the individual versatility of artistic development is underpinned by the unfolding of a life-span developmental process which usually starts with a core dilemma presented in a dramatic and conflictual manner during youth, resolved in maturity, and transcended in old age … “Old age style” is defined as dealing with unresolved contradictions and offering a distillation of artistic perception and a dispensing with ornament in favor of essentials. (80)
I like that final sentence from Cohen-Shalev a lot, though I do feel it describes some instances of “old age style” or late style better than others. Leonard Cohen’s 2016 final album, You Want It Darker, for example, fits the definition almost to a tee: at a sparse nine songs in 36 minutes it strips back Cohen’s poetics to the studs, confronting questions of mortality, faith, and interpersonal ethics head-on over minimalist instrumental tracks.
Other semi-recent examples of late style in pop music that people could invoke, however, like David Bowie’s 2016 Blackstar and Lou Reed’s frequently-maligned Metallica collaboration from 2011, Lulu, arguably trouble Cohen-Shalev’s theorization. “Dispensing with ornament in favor of essentials” feels almost like the opposite of what is happening sonically across Blackstar and Lulu—Bowie’s fearless engagement with jazz on Blackstar and Reed’s adamantly ugly interfacing with metal and dense intertextual invocation of Frank Wedekind’s work on Lulu couldn’t easily be characterized as sombre, minimalist returns to “essentials.”1
All of that said, Songs of a Lost World is decidedly more in the Cohenesque late style mode than the boundary-pushing Bowie and Reed late style mode. Its sonics are often stark and metallic—Reeves Gabrels’ guitar pyrotechnics surface occasionally, but many songs are anchored in Simon Gallup’s distorted bass lines and Jason Cooper’s muscular drum work. Fans of The Cure’s towering canon of pop songs like “In Between Days,” “Close to Me,” “Just Like Heaven,” “Lovesong,” “Pictures of You,” and “Friday I’m in Love” may find the new album slightly alienating, because Smith offers no gleaming moment of pop relief.2
“And Nothing is Forever” and “I Can Never Say Goodbye” are the Songs of a Lost World tracks that deal most explicitly with loss. The latter is directly about Smith’s brother Richard’s passing, as the frontman sings the powerful chorus lines,
Something wicked this way comes
From out the cruel and treacherous night
Something wicked this way comes
To steal away my brother's life
According to Smith in a wide-ranging and enthralling, lengthy interview put out on the eve of Songs of a Lost World’s release, “And Nothing is Forever” is about “a promise that [he] made to someone who was very ill that [he] would be with them when they died, and [he] wasn’t. And, because [he] wasn’t, [he] wrote the song.”
I think I can say that “And Nothing is Forever” is my favourite song on the new album, and easily one of my favourite tracks of 2024. It is an unabashedly sentimental composition, opening with piano, swelling synth pads, and strings and it bears little resemblance, if any, to contemporary “rock” music. At around the 1:42 mark, Gabrels’ soaring guitar leads rocket the song into the stratosphere where it remains until around 5:30 before falling back to earth and returning to its initial piano, synth, and string palette. Lyrically, “And Nothing is Forever” illustrates the profundity of The Cure’s late style on Songs of a Lost World, specifically that newfound perspective that I referred to above. Many of its lyrics one could seamlessly drop into a melodramatic 80s Cure ballad. Take, for example, the pre-chorus, which—up until its final line—could easily be about the dissolution of a twentysomething, romantic relationship:
And slide down close beside me
In the silence of a heartbeat
And wrap your arms around me
In a murmured lullaby
As the memory of the first time
In the stillness of a teardrop
As you hold me for the last time
In the dying of the life
Instead, however, the pre-chorus closes with “in the dying of the life,” which, suddenly, sensitizes us to the record’s stakes, and the immense personal loss that Smith has experienced over the past 5 years. “And Nothing is Forever” is an astonishing song because it is totally unafraid to risk mawkishness in both sonics and lyrics. There’s something intoxicating and excessive about it—something a bit beyond “good taste” that disregards the artful or detached restraint that is typical of writing about mortality and loss—but the song’s excessiveness becomes part of its power, and works to elicit an emotional response in the listener. It is an excessive, ecstatic song because life’s stakes are also—if one reflects on it—immense when we consider those that we cherish in our lives, the limited time with them that we share, and what it means to show up for them.
Songs of a Lost World’s last track, the fittingly-titled “Endsong,” is another crushing, gorgeous moment on the LP. Similar to “Alone” and “And Nothing is Forever,” it opens with a lengthy (in this case 6-minute) instrumental intro of pummelling drums and wailing guitars before Smith enters the song, singing,
And I'm outside in the dark staring at the blood red moon
Remembering the hopes and dreams I had and all I had to do
And wondering what became of that boy and the world he called his own
I'm outside in the dark wondering how I got so old
Apparently—again, according to the lengthy Smith interview published on the band’s YouTube—this stanza recounts an actual stargazing experience that he had where he was forced to reflect on all that had changed over the course of looking up at the stars across his life. Said Smith, “I feel the same looking up at the moon as I did when I was ten, but I’m not the same as when I was ten. And yet I kind of am. The moon’s pretty much the same.” This whimsical gloss of the song seems to undersell the stark bleakness of its chorus, however, where Smith belts variations on “It's all gone, it's all gone / Nothing left of all I loved” before closing the song repeating, “Left alone with nothing at the end of every song.” This final lyric then loops, möbius-like back to the album’s opening lyric on “Alone” quoted above (“This is the end of every song that we sing”), lending the album a thought-provoking, replayable quality that I have been enjoying on recent listens.
Songs of a Lost World is a powerful record, and one that is easily The Cure’s best since, at least, 1992’s Wish. It is also another strong example of late style in pop music to add to a fascinating and ever-expanding canon of records made later in life by pop icons. Coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s debut record, Three Imaginary Boys, in 2029 I don’t know what more we could’ve hoped for from Robert Smith and one of the UK’s defining later-twentieth century bands.
Bob Dylan is another bizarre case for theorizations of late style, but this is more for a temporal reason. His most archetypical late style album—the death-shadowed and moody Time Out of Mind—served as a Grammy-winning comeback for him in 1997, which is now 27 years ago! That Dylan delivered his late style opus during the Clinton administration confuses anyone that tries to periodize his work. Has he been producing according to late style ever since? Was he in late style for a distinct period, and now we’re in … even later style?
Joni Mitchell is similarly puzzling in this regard, having issued her own late style statements (Both Sides Now and Travelogue) in the early 2000s.
Though, admittedly, Smith has teased two more albums in the works, the third of which will supposedly be lighter and poppier by design.