By – Craig Ceravolo

I mean, just look at the title – the most “Cure” sounding album title ever…

The Cure have returned with a new album after 16 years – and it goes against every convention of the current music world to not only be, well, a GOOD Cure album, but by all accounts, successfully received by both fans and critics.

The release was an announcement – there were secret websites with slivers of songs to entice the eager and curious. The artwork with the mysterious black background and a floating monochromatic sculpture of a human head (Is it half-constructed and unfinished or ancient and decayed??). It appeared to be an asteroid spinning thorough space with a trajectory towards Earth. Unlike 2008’s ephemeral offering 4:13 Dream, this release felt important and massive, like an astronomical extinction-level event.

Admittedly the hype machine worked. Everyone has declared it the best since the masterpiece (and it is exactly that) Disintegration. Robert Smith wrote that one 35 years ago as a reflection on getting older…he’d just turned 30. I rarely claim expertise on things…but I will on The Cure; the creative output has been a steep decline since 1992’s Wish. I also think we expect too much from our youthful musical heroes. But I have to say – Songs of a Lost World is a mopey, moody modern miracle: it might just be the proper sequel to Disintegration, all these years later.

I have put aside the production issues I have (it feels loud, compressed and bass guitar heavy – although I have only heard the streaming versions at this point. The CD/Vinyl mixes might be better – The Apple Dolby Atmos mix breathes a little more than the Spotify version) and have given in to this mid-tempo concept album of sorts. The concept being getting old…no, not the “I’m THIRTY! I mourn for my youth!!” getting old…I mean the “oh god, I am closer to the end than the beginning…” sort of introspection. A real stare down the abyss. The pandemic took his brother, and his parents died. The success of SOALW could very well be that Smith’s pursuit of dark imagery, poetic demise and romantic death have caught up with him at 65 years old.

When he was 23 and snarling “It doesn’t matter if we all die” on the opening track of 1982’s Pornography – it seemed bratty and nihilistic. Now, on the SOALW opener Alone he gives us “This is the end of every song that we sing…” In context, this isn’t a dramatic musing on death – it’s a legitimate grappling with “THE END”.  Watching your loved ones die…a very sober reminder that death is real and inescapable.

There are 8 tracks on the album, which to fans waiting for almost two decades might seem disappointing. The runtime is 49 minutes, with the closing track Endsong clocking in at a glacial 10 minutes. Eight is enough. It feels curated and intentional. There is no filler here. It sounds very much like a Cure album…you know, one of the more brooding ones. It’s almost as if Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker would have worked as a title – “Oh you want a Cure record? We will give you a CURE RECORD – get in loser, we are going crying.”

The miracle seems to be giving us what we wanted, but newer. You know, the same…but different. Make it sound like “Disintegration” but don’t insult us with some retread, Robert! And it works. “Drone:nodrone” sounds like “Fascination Street’s” angry child. Hell, “I Can Never Say Goodbye” opens with the sound of a thunderstorm…just like “The Same Deep Water As You” and it seems justified. I have listened to this album in its entirety many times over the course of a week now and it keeps getting better. It’s a statement on all the loss and regret and fear of the end that we all have. The Cure’s fans are on this journey with them, and it might be that we all have stopped romanticizing the end and embraced the sweetness of it, the regrets that come with a life lived and the anger and fear that comes with facing the inevitable. Yes – that sounds very dark and serious, and it is, but The Cure has given us a collection of songs from all the lost worlds and the extinction event can be beautiful.