S Poddar
Robert Smith returns as lead vocalist for the first full-length installment of The Cure in 16 years, Songs Of A Lost World. From the opening whispers and sounds of obscured voices and where single echoes linger, the listener is swept into a powerfully personal deconstruction of death and loss. This is the end of every song that we sing, says Smith in a wail on the opening track ‘Alone’. The mood is therefore set and it is melancholy, but with a glimmer of beauty that the faintest chime can promise. Not at all like ‘Lovecats’, the seven-minute epic is a sprawling introduction to a record that grapples with death and loss, and which yet offers a few rare moments of tenderness and reflection. He has spoken about this album as an expression of the grief he has lived with throughout his lifetime.
In various interviews, including with NME, he described the record as “merciless,” channeling the darker emotions he had weathered. Since the release of their 4:13 Dream in 2008, Smith has experienced the losses of both his mother and father, as well as the loss of his brother, factors that are bound to have affected the themes of the new record. Inspired by their goth-rock roots, more specifically by the 1982 classic Pornography, Songs Of A Lost World returned the band to that darker, brooding sound. One can clearly see here that Smith approached this album as a form of catharsis. Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. was one of the first to recently classify the bittersweetness in their music as a “final hug”—a mix of happiness and sorrow.
This feeling resonates into the approach of The Cure in the making of this album. And above all, ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ is a highlight. This song does somehow remind of the great sadness of such masterpieces: ‘Plainsong’, ‘Pictures Of You’, yet it outlines the futility of change and loss. I know that my world has gone cold / But it really doesn’t matter if you say we’ll be together. It’s like a waltzing into winter with lyrics, one that captures at once the beauty and the sadness of acceptance with time passing. And though much of the album goes to aspects of darkness, through it all, there is still some light shining. Track highlights include ‘A Fragile Thing,’ with such catchy pop hooks, still heavy with the depth of Smith’s musings on life and love.
He ruminates on relationships, wherein “love is everything,” yet admits “there is nothing you can do to change the end.” It’s a poignant moment where Smith is at peace with the inevitable. If that’s not enough of the album’s bleakness, ‘Warsong’ certainly is. It’s a heavy, crushing song, lamenting “the hope of what we might have been,” a staple of lyrical matter on the album throughout.
‘Drone_Nodrone’ actually is a rather noirish rock affair, where an obsessive refrain seems to be riddled with the mischievous intent of those songs from The Cure like ‘One Hundred Years’ or ‘Killing An Arab’. It is gritty and intense, a track that teeters between despair and defiance. Perhaps though, in the album’s most devastating moment of emotional heartache, there is in ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ where Smith confronts the anguish of losing his brother. You can feel the raw pain at what it must be like to watch someone slip away as he sings, “As lightning splits the sky apart, I’m whispering his name / He has to wake up,”.
This captures that deep, dull ache that lingers well after someone is gone. He finds himself saying, “Something wicked this way comes / To steal away my brother’s life.” This album is an incredibly harrowing, deeply personal track from the band that shows their ability to tap into even the deepest emotional trenches. The album culminates with the 10-minute opus of ‘Endsong’, bringing the entire story full circle. Mortality is a theme that appeared in the opener, and this epic closer revisits it.
It is hauntingly true, as penned by Smith: “at the end of every song, left alone with nothing.” That message is bleak without question; but in beauty, the music comforts us, yet the darkness doesn’t feel as suffocating, as this band weaves lush soundscapes. Robert Smith has intimated himself that more records might be a possibility, but as it stands, Songs Of A Lost World forms a wonderfully coherent work in itself, and arguably one of the most personal records of Smith’s entire career. It is something that engages with mortality and loss in ways that feel at once both intensely personal and universal, yet amidst the darkness, light, and tenderness and hope somehow seep through.
The record is about death, but it’s about finding meaning and beauty even as life slips away from you. Songs Of A Lost World is something of a testimonial to The Cure’s capacity to be at their most heart-breakingly moving when they are most broken.
