The Cure's “Songs of a Lost World”: All 8 tracks ranked

“And Nothing is Forever” might be the most conventionally beautiful track on the album, with its gentle opening passage of strange piano chords and sweeping synth strings. But conventional beauty has never really been what Cure does best. The song is so slow it's positively funereal, which goes with the lyrics.

“And Nothing Is Forever is about a promise I made to someone who was very ill that I would be with them when they died. And I wasn't. And because I wasn't, I wrote the song,” Smith explained in a 100-minute video interview released two weeks before the album. The Cure has favored long instrumental intros for a long time – consider how “Fascination Street” grooved for over two minutes before Smith opened his mouth. Songs of a Lost Worldhowever, takes this approach to new extremes, with several songs saving all the lyrics for the second half of the track.

Bassist Simon Gallup is the Cure's longest-serving member other than Robert Smith – he's been in the band since 1979, with the exception of 18 months in the mid-80s and a strange 2-month stint in 2021 when he announced, and in then he turned back, another departure from the Cure. Gallup's rumbling basslines have always been an important element of the Cure's signature sound, but his highly distorted bass is front and center in the mix. Songs of a Lost World like never before.

Indeed, “All I Ever Am,” which features Gallup playing a very catchy tune that would probably have been played on the piano on an '80s Cure album. Much of the album will already be familiar to fans who saw the Cure on their Shows of a Lost World tour in 2023. “All I Ever Am,” however, was one of three songs not previewed on the tour, along with with “Warsong” and “Drone:Nodrone”.

“Endsong” is one of two song titles Lost Worldalong with “Warsong”, which immediately brings to mind “Plainsong” and “Lovesong” from Decompositionthe latter is the Cure's biggest US chart hit reaching No. 2 on the Hot 100. At over 10 minutes long, “Endsong” is the second-longest studio track in the Cure catalog, surpassed only by the 11-minute “Watching Me Fall” from the 2000s Bloodflowers. Tambourine and drum handclaps give “Endsong” a more polyrhythmic stir than the rest of the album, as the track slowly builds to Smith's vocal, which reaches over six minutes into the song.

“Endsong” certainly feels like it could be a curtain call on the Cure's entire career, but that's not Smith's plan. In his interview to promote the album, Smith revealed that the band is working on two more new albums, one of which is “almost finished”.

“Alone” has opened nearly every Cure concert since 2022, and in September became the first new Cure studio track to be released in over a decade. What's most striking about the song, and what sent waves of excitement among die-hard Cure fans, is how little the 7-minute track sounds like a lead single. “Alone” is a strong statement of intent that the album is for the fans, not the radio programmers. There's a brutal physicality to the way Jason Cooper, the Cure's drummer since 1995, hits his snare drum and tom-toms on “Alone,” but it's a commanding and graceful song, with a haunting descending triplet that he plays the piano and the guitar.

American guitarist Reeves Gabrels is best known for the signature phrasing and screeching of his work with Davie Bowie and Tin Machine, and his sound was particularly recognizable the first time he played on a Cure song, 1997's 'Wrong Number' .Gabrels is much more reserved about most things Songs of a Lost Worldthe first album since he became a full member of the Cure in 2012. The most notable exception is his wild, dissonant guitar on 'Drone:Nodrone'. It's extreme Songs from a lost world: the most uptempo song, as well as the only lyric fully set in the modern world, with Smith raging at surveillance technology after seeing a drone fly over his house.

Smith says he wrote “Warsong” about “someone I had a fight with, made up with, fought with” and the conflict inherent in human relationships. Since over a dozen musicians have played in the Cure over the past few decades, many of whom leave and return, there's really no telling what the song is exactly. At 4 minutes and 17 seconds, “Warsong” would be the longest song on the Cure's 1979 debut Three fantastic boysbut here, it's the shortest part. “I want your death, you want my life” is perhaps the album's best example of the kind of devastatingly apt and dramatic lyrics for which Smith is known and loved.

Both Robert Smith's parents and his brother Richard died in the 2010s. And the sense of sadness and loss that hangs ominously Songs of a Lost World it is felt most profoundly in 'I Can Never Say Goodbye', which was written about Richard's unexpected death. At one point, Smith sings “Something wicked this way coming,” a line coined by Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Macbeth. “I Can Never Say Goodbye” opens with rain sound effects, which may be reminiscent Decomposition “The Same Deep Water as You” fans.

Songs of a Lost WorldIts second single is the only time on the album that Smith sings in the first minute of the song – just 50 seconds. It's also his strongest vocal performance on the album, with multi-track harmonies on the chorus. When an aging artist releases a new album, the first thing that strikes you is often how time has changed his voice. Smith at 65 sounds remarkably identical to Smith at 25, though, especially when his voice expressively cracks the word “regret.”