While Tyler, the Creator’s “CHROMAKOPIA” is the big talk of the town this week (and yes, it’s good), I think the even bigger release for the music industry as a whole this week was “Songs of a Lost World” by The Cure. Why? Well, to answer that, we have to go back to 2008, when The Cure released “4:13 Dream” and went on tour. Everything was grand, and even though the album wasn’t as well received as everything else they’ve put out, it still had a fanbase. By 2010, fans began itching for another album that would be released soon, but it never came. Instead, for the next 14 years, lead vocalist and guitarist Robert Smith would do a song and dance anytime he was pressed on the album to avoid giving a clear answer, saying either “it’s coming” or “next year.”
Fans began losing hope, with some downright denying that another album would be released — or that it would even be good, for that matter. However, The Cure officially announced Sept. 26 that they were putting out a new album Nov. 1, which brings us to now. “Songs of a Lost World” does a lot of things right, but the best thing is stopping the unnecessary (and often boring) progression the band was experiencing from the mid-’90s to the early 2000s.
The album opens with “Alone” as Smith and the band slowly drag listeners into a moody climate, one they build until Smith crashes in singing about the abstract horror of loneliness. In “Warsong,” Smith laments about the exhaustive cycle of violence in human nature as the band plays a sludgy riff that calls back to the stadium goth rock days of “Disintegration,” The Cure’s 1989 album.
However, the crown jewel of the album has to be its last song, which is aptly named “Endsong.” This track has all of the best bits of The Cure wrapped into a 10-minute production. A sprawling instrumental opens and lures you into a trance as the song slowly builds up until the five-minute mark. Once the vocals come in, the song blows into its second phase. Smith sings of aging as his memories become ghostly moments that haunt him rather than uplift him. The vivid feeling and imagery the song delivers won’t soon be forgotten.
Overall, “Songs of a Lost World” is great and blew any expectations I had for it out of the water (and they were set low). The Cure managed to not only put out an album that is their best since their 1992 release, “Wish,” but they also showed that spending time crafting an album is worth the wait, even if it takes 16 years. If this happens to be the band’s last album, it will be an excellent swan song for a group that has contributed so much to the alternative scene for the past 40 years.
