Songs Of A Lost World: Nothing Lost For The Cure In 2024
Words: Derek Block
February 24th 2025
Last year I saw The Cure – my favorite band of all time–live for 90 dollars at the Xfinity Center. As Robert Smith and co were in their late 60s, they remained still on stage, diverting all their energy into creating the best live sonic performance I’ve ever heard. This band found its sound in the 80s and spent 40 years passionately experimenting with and refining it, becoming the most beloved and influential gothic rock, proto-emo, alt-pop, and soundscape band of all time. Although my bias might have come through the moment I called The Cure “my favorite band of all time,” I have always been fully critical of their bad moments and experimental misses, of which there are plenty (e.g., their self-titled 2004 record).
When any band has been playing for 45 years a palpable and pervasive desperation to capture their old sound and audience plagues all their new releases, even when they’re not too bad, epitomized by The Smashing Pumpkins’ new record Aghori Mhori Mei. These albums often end up feeling inauthentic, even slightly embarrassing, and usually unlistenable after the first go. Given this unfortunate pattern, my expectations for Songs of a Lost World were pretty low, even after they surprised the crowd with a solid single teaser during last year’s live tour. Songs of a Lost World dropped in November, and shockingly, it’s a melancholy masterpiece worthy of a spot on a Mount Rushmore of the band’s discography.
As I pressed play and song after song washed over me, not only was I floored by the album’s unexpected quality, but also by the realization that it may be one of the better records they have ever created. Pitchforks and torches down, please. Trust me I’ve listened to them all. In Songs of a Lost World, The Cure honed in on every unique aspect that the band has presented in the past and put their unrivaled creative souls into perfecting them. The layers of instrumentation are perfectly chosen, toned, and mixed. Musicians and producer readers understand the challenge of blending many instrumental tracks without simply making a messy wall of sound. This album should be an ideal teaching point in any audio production class.
As a guitarist, my all-time favorite thing about Robert Smith and The Cure is their innovative and simply awesome guitar tones, which they dial in, keep cohesive throughout records, and give space with defining simplistic melodies. In 2024, The Cure stands strong against the new wave of terrible social media guitar players who aggressively and competitively shred and tap their instrument without consideration of sonic creativity or listener enjoyability. It’s a difficult, humble choice to keep it simple and melodic, allowing tone and harmony to keep parts folding over each other until you can’t even distinguish where the strings, synth, or bass end and the amazing droning guitar leads begin.
Speaking of droning, one of my favorites on the album, “Drone:Nodrone”, somehow meshes two heavy, distorted guitars (one sounds just like my favorite Cure tone, the wah-pedal lead on “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me”) with juxtaposed clean strings, piano, and vocals to create an energy-filled gem that I simply still cannot believe came from a 2024 Cure Album. The same effect is done throughout the record, highlighted again in “And Nothing Is Forever,” where distorted guitars are mixed into surprisingly clean, orchestral soundscapes. “Warsong” gets even heavier, becoming another favorite of mine, bringing bending, distorted tones even more to the forefront to make a dark, Pornography style track. This song also includes the addition of the same plucked string tone from one of everyone’s favorite Disintegration tracks, “Lullaby”. “Warsong”, and the record as a whole, feels like watching an aging Robert Smith remember all the innovative moments that made The Cure so amazing in the ‘80s and ‘90s while compiling them into a modern hit.
Robert Smith plays with vocal production much more than usual on this record, bringing in subtle harmonies, echoes, and background vocals that usually don’t appear. However, I missed these experimentations after they were largely abandoned with the “gothic rock era.” Lyrically, Smith tackles his love for music, as well as his nihilistic anxieties about mental decline, aging, and the amount of impact he has left to leave. Amid his classically melodramatic and Edgar Allan Poe-like lyricism, such as the “Warsong” lyrics, “...Vengeful anger, burning deep inside / Poison in our blood / And pain, broken dreams.” He asks why he sees so much change around him while he feels just the same as he did 40 years ago. Where did all the time go?
While listeners will likely sympathize with Robert, I can imagine that many, like myself, are amazed and pleased with how his voice itself has not changed at all (both live and on this record). You could slide any song from this contemporary project into their late 80s/early 90s records, and I doubt anyone would notice. Stylistically, this album sits somewhere between some of their best later works, including Wish and Disintegration, but could be best described as a better-produced version of Bloodflowers, without ever feeling self-derivative or inauthentic. His melancholy lyrics are present, real, and even more personal than usual. Old innovative sounds are combined with new ones: new leads, new tricks, new (better) mixing, and even better record cohesion than before. Although, that was never really a problem for The Cure.
The album closes with “Endsong”. It’s my personal favorite and the track that I now hope will be the outro to my own life. While this song stood out to me for its simply unmatched, ethereal soundscape that I could listen to forever, the album is so polished, cohesive, and effective that I see no need to recommend specific songs or advise against others. Reader, listen to any of them, listen to all of them.
Cure fans, try your best to avoid the nostalgia bias – I know Disintegration is the best album ever and nothing will compare blah blah blah. However, this record is The Cure at its best, their sound epitomized and produced to perfection, which is something that, frankly, nobody predicted for them in 2024, especially given the often-mediocre tracks we’ve gotten since 1992. I sadly thought that this would be their final album, but after hearing it, I now highly doubt that is the case.
Both lyrically and sonically, this album is so full of inspiration and love for the band’s historic sound and music in general, that there is simply no way that they don’t have another album or two coming (though likely without more exhausting global tours). After all, they’re really, really old. Songs of a Lost World is an unexpected masterpiece with a poignant lyrical and sonic theme of cataclysmic internal apocalypse that may bring others, like myself, comfort in its articulation of the inarticulable dread surrounding recent events. On the off chance that this really is it for them– what a career, and what a way to go out. 5/5