Album sales are not, of course, what they used to be, but many will have been tickled this week with the news that the Cure’s first album in 16 years is outselling the rest of the UK top 10 combined. Songs of a Lost World will be their first number one album in Britain since 1992’s Wish . That was arguably the most commercial Cure album of them all, but their latest offering has much more in common with Disintegration .
And that 1989 album is almost universally agreed to be the very best Cure album. The new one — which has been many years in gestation — has a similarly doom-laden outlook to Disintegration . That album was fixated by the passage of time as Robert Smith, then about to hit the ripe old age of 30, fretted about mortality.
Now aged 65, it’s a theme that’s all to real both to him and to those goth lovers who have been on the Cure journey since the end of the 1970s. Over the course of eight lengthy, stately, unhurried tracks, the veteran band deliver music that’s atmospheric, evocative and devastatingly effective. It’s an album that unfurls glacially, but it weaves a snare early on.
Opening song, Alone , is typical. The first three-odd minutes offers dense orchestral and shoegaze manoeuvres that sounds both hopeful and melancholy — two words that neatly sum up this album — before Smith’s vocals finally appear. ( Disintegration also features a lengthy instrumental intro.
) Smith sings of “stars grown dim with tears” and, unsettlingly, “bird.