The Songs of the Beautiful Lost World of the Cure

2018 and 2019 marked the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Cure and that of their first album, Three Imaginary Boys. Robert Smith had thought it a good thing to release an unreleased album, but then the project foundered. The songs were already there, they had been written between 2014 and 2017, it was almost thirty tracks. In practice, the Cure recorded material for three albums in 2019, which they had originally intended to release a couple of months apart. During their extensive touring, the band played some of these several times, testing the reaction of the audience. Thirteen sounded particularly good together, but to balance 'light and dark', Smith substituted some and cut out others, thus chiselling out Songs of a Lost World and its eight songs.

Thus, the lockdown period had arrived, when the singer could enjoy some solitude and read more than a hundred books. But Smith's melancholic soul had meanwhile had to come to terms with the loss of his parents and his brother. To set this 'lost world' to music, the Blackpool artist went back to his teenage listening: Nick Drake, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Ian's Tea and Sympathy, Bowie's Life On Mars, so much so that Smith often asked himself during the making of the record 'what would David do at this point?' But unlocking this process was one track in particular, the opening Alone, which, inspired by Ernest Dowson's poem Dregs, begins with the line 'This is the end of every song we sing'. It is almost seven minutes of majesty, with hazy synthesisers, rocky, circular drums, harsh guitars and a backlit piano. The tempo is suspended, the atmosphere rarefied, Smith's voice touching. Waiting a few decades for a gem that has the task of introducing us to such a desperate and reflective album was certainly worth it.

At its opposite, the ten minutes of Endsong bring the curtain down on Songs of a Lost World with a merciless consideration of the concept of conclusion, that of a song, but also that of our lives. Before this ending, however, a little light filters through, as in the melodies and rhythm of A Fragile Thing, or in the lyrics of And Nothing Is Forever, where Smith, after all, seems to serenely accept the passing of time, being in his mid-sixties. And, after all, even when the darkness deepens, he always retains his lustre. In the dense Warsong the hope is that of "what we could have been", while the melodies of I Can Never Say Goodbye, the farewell for the singer's brother, keep their charm intact. Drone:Nodrone takes the Cure into industrial territories, All I Ever Am returns to the theme of the 'tired dance with age'.

Songs of a Lost World is probably the most introspective album by the Cure, a band that after four decades and fourteen albums has never betrayed its credibility.