How the Cure, back after 16 years, made the best rock album of 2024
Let’s face it: For most of 2024, for most of recent memory, rock music has been dead.
But just as the Day of the Dead is upon us, the Cure has brought the genre back to life.
The goth gods — who had been left for dead after not releasing a new studio LP since 2008’s “4:13 Dream” — have come back after 16 long years with the best rock album of 2024: “Songs of a Lost World,” which fittingly dropped the day after Halloween.
It’s Friday, and I’m in love with the Cure all over again.
“Songs of a Lost World” is easily the Cure’s best album since 1992’s “Wish” — which included their hit “Friday I’m in Love” — but maybe even since their 1989 masterpiece “Disintegration.”
That’s saying a whole helluva lot for a band that didn’t owe us anything else — and could’ve easily coasted along on the well-deserved Rock & Roll Hall of Fame props they earned in 2019.
After all, like many legendary rock bands of a certain age, they were still selling out arenas on the nostalgic strength of their golden oldies.
On “Songs of a Lost World,” these alt-rock icons have staged the most unlikely of revivals just when they had nothing to lose.
The eight-track “Songs” is a revelation in an era where real albums don’t exist anymore. There are no obvious “singles” here — the kind that saw the Cure hit the Top 40 with “Just Like Heaven,” “Lovesong” and “Friday I’m in Love.”
But it’s an album that allows you to get lost in its otherworld for 49 minutes that won’t have you simply skipping to the next track.
It’s an album that is meant — make that, demands — to be experienced from start to finish.
With its orchestral grandeur — these dense, painstakingly detailed arrangements might make you understand why it took 16 years — “Songs” plays like a symphony in eight movements, taking you on a journey that begins and ends with symmetric echoes.
“This is the end of every song that we sing,” croons Robert Smith — the Cure’s mascara-eyed frontman — at the beginning of “Alone,” the opener that sets the moody mood of the album with alluring atmospherics that hark back to “Disintegration.”
“Alone” is bookended by “Endsong,” which brings the album to a 360 finish: “Left alone with nothing/The end of every song” before one final “Nothing.”
It’s a classic Cure closer that brings you to a final destination, which is everything.
Amid an enrapturing soundscape — complete with cascading drums that put you in a rhythmic twist to go along with the emotional one — the epic “Endsong” doesn’t even get a peep from Smith until over six minutes into its 10-plus minutes.
Like many of the songs on “Songs of a Lost World,” it takes its bittersweet time unfolding, stretching and swelling out to a sumptuous splendor. It might be annoying if it wasn’t so absorbing.
As the title suggests, the album is a goth-rock reflection on loss: loss of loved ones, loss of youth, loss of idealism, loss of hope.
“I know, I know that my world has grown old,” sings Smith on “And Nothing Is Forever,” facing his own mortality at 65.
His tortured, tremulous wail hasn’t lost any of its strength in its ability to express fragility.
“I’m pretty much done/Staring down the barrel of the same warm gun,” a defeated Smith sings on the “Never Enough”-esque “Drone:Nodrone.” One of the more uptempo tracks on this downbeat affair — no surprise there — it has a grunge edge with its grinding, winding guitars.
If there were to be a “single,” this would be it.
But “I Can Never Say Goodbye” — a haunting, heartbreaking ode to Smith’s late brother Richard — is the grief-ridden soul of “Songs of a Lost World.”
“Something wicked this way comes/To steal away my brother’s life,” sings Smith.
Those sorrowful strings tug away at the tatters of any worn-out spirit.
It’s a cathartic beauty and power that the Cure has, against all odds, found again.
