Cure - Lost Innocence

The Cure are a trio of eighteen-year-olds from Crawley, Sussex trying to break into Britain's 1977 music scene through the most classic rock formula: guitar (Robert Smith), bass (Michael Dempsey), drums (Lol Tolhurst). We're in the thick of the punk era (that summer the Sex Pistols had shaken up England with the anthem "Anarchy In The Uk") and the Cure's music bears this influence, blending it however with a typically British taste for pop melody and producing a string of lively, short, immediately catchy songs.

The debut will therefore be rather far from the atmospheric sound for which the trio will become famous, even rawer than the "An Ideal For Living" EP, which in 1978 announces the arrival of Joy Division on the scene. And yet there's no shortage of signs of what's to come: "Killing An Arab", their first released single, is a lean, taut track in classic punk tradition, but it builds an air of mystery through exotic-flavoured melodic lines and a spectral, anguished voice, singing about an episode drawn from Albert Camus's existentialist novel "The Stranger". The B-side of the 7", released in the winter of '78 and reissued in '79 by Fiction, is "10:15 Saturday Night", a track that stands as the Cure's true musical manifesto, with a sense of claustrophobia created by the obsessive repetition of the same bass and guitar figures, later released into a liberating crescendo on the chorus.

Robert Smith establishes himself from the start as a charismatic figure, able to stamp the band's entire output with his distinctive guitar style (sparing in notes, but hugely effective) and his vocal style (passionate and querulous at once).

In '79 comes another emblematic track for the band, "Boys Don't Cry", which reveals to the world Smith's supreme talent for crafting catchy pop melodies, but also the nostalgic streak in his nature, looking at once back to rock music's age of innocence, the Sixties, and, in an existential key, to a lost childhood, destined to be recalled with regret. These elements will recur throughout the band's output, and will end up securing their success through the Eighties.

The debut album Three Imaginary Boys revisits the pop-rock formula of the early singles (which, following typically British tradition, aren't included) with less flair, but still delivers at least two more gems in "Fire In Cairo", an admirable example of Smith's crystalline style, and the title track, the first of many melancholy ballads by the band, invariably destined to culminate in a searing solo from the leader.

The album has a strange fate: almost disowned by Smith, who regards it as something of a false start but who will never fail to revisit large chunks of it live, it will be referenced by Massive Attack on "Mezzanine" in 1998 (with a sample of "10:15") and by numerous other bands in the 2000s: Bloc Party fans listening to this record might feel a sense of familiarity.

Come closer and see

See into the trees

Find the girl

If you can

("A Forest")

With Seventeen Seconds in 1980 the mood darkens, the rhythms slow down, sparse guitar notes echo in an empty space, in which Smith's voice emerges at intervals, like an otherworldly lament. It's the record that hands down to history the Cure as we best know them, as well as the song that represents them more than any other.

Backed by a sinister lyric (“Come closer and see/ See into the trees/ Find the girl/ If you can”), "A Forest" is an irresistible rise-and-fall of bass and guitar that, after about six minutes of a trip, lose themselves in the tangle of a solo coiling around itself until it fades out over the cadenced notes of a bass resembling a pulsing heartbeat. The change is the result of Simon Gallup joining on four strings (from then on a mainstay of the band and a true alter ego to Smith) but also of an encounter with the icy atmospheres of records like Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" and "The Scream" by Siouxsie and the Banshees, as well as the devastating effect of a night spent opening for Wire, after which Smith, shaken by the unequal comparison, decided to toughen up the Cure's sound.

At times there's therefore a fuller sound, thanks to the first, simple synth interventions ("In Your House") and a guitar treated with heavy use of the flanger, shimmering in the lively "Play For Today", razor-sharp in the long hypnosis of "At Night" (whose lyrics draw on a short piece by Kafka), solemn on the title track.

It's Ian Curtis's band that exerts the greatest influence on Faith, the Cure's third LP, by now committed to tackling long tracks, slow-building and solemn in development and defined by the sound of keyboards and six-string bass (or baritone guitar), which often flank or replace the guitar. On the single "Primary" two basses chase each other breathlessly, with a linear, energetic drive, as the best new wave school dictates, while on the title track the two instruments engage in a calm dialogue destined to break down in the finale into a desperate trickle underscored by the voice: "There's nothing left but faith" — no ideas or values left to cling to, save an irrational hope.

It's the keyboard-dominated tracks, though, that set the tone for the album: "All Cats Are Grey" and "The Funeral Party" are two contemplative abysses where even the typical conventions of songwriting are abandoned, making it hard to pick out anything resembling a chorus, and in the first track the vocals only enter after a long introduction, immediately giving way to a funereal coda. The voice builds genuine litanies, desperate orations on the theme of lost innocence and the awareness of death, in a kind of pagan liturgy that forges, once and for all, the myth of the Cure at their most gothic.

A brief return to the 45rpm format brings us "Charlotte Sometimes", danceable and romantic, where Smith seems to identify, not for the last time, with a sweet, dreamy feminine ideal, the only lifeline in the face of the genuine anguish that seems to grip him.

Doesn't matter if we all die

("One Hundred Years")

And yet there remains a perverse gift for melody that makes these obsessive, painful songs irresistible, and that will make the even more accomplished follow-up album, Pornography, truly great. Here the bass and drums come to the fore with an almost tribal effect, while the guitar strings together some of the sharpest, most memorable riffs Smith ever came up with.

"One Hundred Years", kicked off by a chilling line ("Doesn't matter if we all die") and propelled by a hammering drum machine, builds a thriller-like crescendo through a pile-up of claustrophobic riffs that are then torn apart by a convulsive break; "The Figurehead" replicates the same scheme in a solemn, lyrical key, its climax landing on the key line ("I can't never say no/ to anyone but you"); "Siamese Twins" advances dragged along by a circular, slow and inexorable riff, all the way to the final scream "is it always like this?". The title track even abandons Smith the guitarist's usual, clean rock forms, surrendering instead to an ambient nightmare that seems equally descended from Joy Division's "Atrocity Exhibition" and Pink Floyd's "Empty Spaces" (are we looking at new wave's own "The Wall"?).

It's Smith's lyrics and declamations, however, that turn every track into a genuine anthem for a crisis shared by the singer with the kids in his audience, disoriented by the lack of prospects and the conformism of the Eighties, to which they react by turning the Cure into a true cult phenomenon, ready to spread from England across the rest of Europe. On Pornography the theme of the fall from an original state of innocence is pushed to its most extreme consequences, delivering a vision of a world made of degradation and corruption, where experience, time and sex are merely the viaticum of a death that has never been so close to life itself. The chorus of "Hanging Garden", with its "fall, fall out of the sky", elevates this theme to sheer magniloquence, even quoting Milton's "Paradise Lost" (and the episode of Lucifer's fall), casting the singer as a genuine fallen angel of rock.

These are songs destined to last, so it's no surprise to hear "All Cats Are Grey" close out Sofia Coppola's ultra-cool 2006 film "Marie Antoinette".

In 1983 Smith pulls off a shapeshifting move worthy of his idol David Bowie: on one hand he joins the Banshees as guitarist (taking part in the live album "Nocturne" and the LP "Hyaena"), on the other he bombards the radio with a string of pop singles ("Let's Go To Bed", "The Walk", "The Lovecats"), aimed at dispelling the band's gloomy image and propelling it toward commercial success. This latter goal owes much above all to Tim Pope's music videos, which turn Smith into an icon of Eighties pop: shocks of raven-black hair swept back, eyeliner round the eyes, lipstick on the lips, for a kind of sad clown, as aware of the utter futility of worldly things as he is of the possibility of having a good time while it lasts. After Ziggy Stardust, it's one of the strongest images in rock of the past thirty years, so much so that it was picked up almost wholesale by the brilliant American director Tim Burton for his 1990 film "Edward Scissorhands".

Say goodbye on a night like this

If it’s the last thing we ever do

You never looked as lost as this

Sometimes it doesn't even look like you

(“A Night Like This”)

This hedonistic Smith drives albums like 1984's The Top and 1985's The Head On The Door to success, poised between pop, nostalgic Sixties psychedelia and new wave echoes, carried along by easily accessible singles. "Inbetween Days" is striking for the way it brings the most melodic lessons of New Order closer to a "Boys Don't Cry"-style pop-rock, steering them away from dance music; "Close To Me" has Smith declaiming over a rubbery, danceable bassline reminiscent of XTC, while "The Caterpillar" is a ballad accompanied by backing vocals and vocalizations that are at once childlike and sinister, somewhere between Syd Barrett's acoustic dreams and Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill".

This is quality pop, one that will find echoes in later years ("Just Like Heaven" will be a romantic sister to "Inbetween Days", adding a dreamy guitar riff of its own) and which dispels the accusations of cynicism hovering over the two oddball singles of '83, namely the cartoon jazz of "The Lovecats" and the Japan/"Blue Monday" pastiche of "The Walk".

On the mid-Eighties records, the previous templates are broken apart through the insertion of exotic sounds (see the flamenco of "The Blood", the Arabic-tinged textures of "Wailing Wall", the Japanese-flavoured "Kyoto Song"), following the example set by the Banshees from "A Kiss In The Dreamhouse" onward; more decidedly rock modes are also adopted (a "Shake Dog Shake" redolent of the Psychedelic Furs, a "Push" reminiscent of Gilmour-esque "Run Like Hell"), while blatantly sunny melodies and rhythms are experimented with (in the singles, but also in the crooked soul solo that adorns "A Night Like This").

If The Head On The Door aims for pop perfection and reaches success (helped by the video for "Close To Me", with the Cure locked in a wardrobe that plunges off a cliff), The Top is a sickly, transitional record, enriched however by unconventional lyrical and musical references. "The Birdmad Girl" echoes lines from Dylan Thomas's poem "Love In The Asylum", tackling the theme of madness in touching fashion, while "Bananafishbones" simultaneously recalls, in a postmodern leap, Salinger's "Nine Stories" ("A perfect day for bananafishbones") and David Bowie's "It's No Game", dwelling on the fame-suicide pairing, one which Smith seems to have decided not to subscribe to.

With 1987's Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me the stakes are raised, helped along by the arrival in the band of the excellent guitarist Porl Thompson (later with Page and Plant): the album ranges across convulsive whirls of psychedelic guitars ("The Kiss"), raga ("The Snakepit"), Eastern atmospheres (the excellent "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep", recently covered by the Deftones), but also delirious funk excursions ("Hot, Hot, Hot"), rhythm and blues ("Why Can't I Be You"), and disco ("Icing Sugar").

In its reckless, sprawling double-album format - a not-too-unworthy offspring of the Beatles' White Album from '68 by the Beatles - the album proves to be a genuine career peak for the Cure, crowned by the success of the elegiac “Just Like Heaven”, a song so universally loved that even Dinosaur Jr took a liking to it, covering it in hard-rock form the following year. This is also the Cure's erotic record, where sex is partly freed from the death-drive that weighed it down on Pornography (though traces survive as literary quotation, see the Baudelairean overtones of “The Kiss”) and channelled instead into a warmer sensuality.

I’ll never dream of you again

(“Disintegration”)

With yet another surprise move, Smith returns to immerse himself in the romantic, dramatic atmospheres of the early Eighties, while still retaining the melodic craft he'd honed in the meantime, and in 1989 delivers the masterpiece Disintegration.

The album sees the success of singles such as “Lullaby” (which is to Robert Smith what “Ashes To Ashes” is to David Bowie), “Lovesong” and “Pictures Of You”, but it's best appreciated for the body of remaining songs, which, while fairly straightforward ballads at heart, astonish for the thunderous, majestic character of their arrangements, where the rhythmic obsessions of Pornography are reborn in elegiac, fatalistic form, marking out the unfolding of regret for time passing, innocence now far away, and dreams ever more out of reach.

Punctuating the usual declamations are the orchestral parts recreated by keyboardist O'Donnell (who produces a heart-wrenching piano figure on “Homesick”) and the minimal riffs played on six-string bass, an instrument to which Smith manages to give an entirely original sound and purpose, often using it on the most autobiographical tracks. “Pictures Of You”, in particular, builds an authentic interior monologue on regret and longing for love, letting it flow over a hypnotic riff, freeing it from the constraints of conventional songwriting, in a stream of consciousness that rises and falls along with the melody, following the ebb and flow of remembered happiness and bitter returns to reason (“se solo avessi trovato le parole giuste/ per aggrapparmi al tuo cuore”).

Also memorable are the opening fanfare of “Plainsong”, a “Last Dance” steeped in liquid guitars, the pathos of “Same Deep Water As You”, where the voice seems broken by tears and the solo climbs to lyrical heights, the vocal tour de force of “Disintegration”, and the final surrender of an “Untitled” which, over a sobbing accordion, seems to send both singer and listeners, exhausted, off to the rest of a dreamless sleep (“I'll never dream of you again”).

What lodges itself in the collective memory, though, is the video for “Lullaby”, yet another masterpiece from Tim Pope. The song, a sort of arachnophobic nursery rhyme recited by Smith (following the tradition of the nursery rhymes that somewhat sadistic English parents used to tell their children), accompanied by vaguely funky guitars and synthetic waltz-leaning strings, poised in a dreamlike balance, is translated visually into a Gothic nightmare paying homage to David Lynch's debut film “Eraserhead” (1977), in which the protagonist dreams of sinking into his bed as if swallowed by a giant mouth. Considering the vertical hairstyle sported by the film's protagonist - and still worn by the director himself today - one wonders whether the true forerunner of the “goth” look wasn't actually the man behind “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive”…

The bulk of the Cure's career closes with Wish in 1992, a pleasant album but one that's interesting chiefly for the ease with which it embraces the sounds of the shoegazer movement then in vogue. Hence the tough attack of “Open”, the wah-wah delirium of “Cut”, the miasma of “End”, the oceanic epos of “From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea”, with its melody swelling and receding like a tidal wave, driven forward by the foam of effects-laden guitars.

It's an energetic record (even in its more pop-leaning tracks, see the delightfully silly “Doing The Unstuck”), which sacrifices the old introspection for sounds capable of filling the American stadiums where the band, at the peak of their success, now regularly found themselves playing. For a group like the Cure, unjustly pigeonholed by critics into the narrow confines of the gothic category, it's worth noting how fully they belong to the evolution of British popular music, as heirs to the Beatles, Pink Floyd and David Bowie, and as an influence (not the only one, of course) on bands like Slowdive, Cranes and Mogwai.

With the (fleeting) fireworks of the last hit, “Friday I'm In Love”, now extinguished, what remains is a band that doesn't know how to end its own story. Hence the recent albums of new material, always decent (despite disappointing the most die-hard fans) but ultimately superfluous, unable to add anything new to their familiar stylistic tics beyond a veneer of hard-won maturity - from the jarring excesses of Wild Mood Swings (1996, the weakest title in the catalogue), to the melancholy of Bloodflowers (2000), to the not-always-justified bombast of The Cure, which finds Smith teaming up with Ross Robinson, producer of Korn's debut album, and surprisingly lively as he approaches the threshold of fifty. These are records torn between the temptation to take risks and the need for reassurance and validation.

Hence the welcome use of warm acoustic textures on Wild Mood Swings (equipped with a string quartet and a horn section that makes old fans wince), thrilling on the epic “Want” and on the intimate “Jupiter's Crash” and “Treasure”, but overdone in the glut of insipid pop songs thrown in to woo radio stations utterly oblivious and lost in the exploits of the Gallagher brothers (we're in the thick of the Britpop storm).

The single “Wrong Number”, frankly mediocre, provides the occasion for an anecdote: in 1997 Robert Smith finally met David Bowie, his idol ever since he was struck as a teenager by “Ziggy Stardust”, and celebrated the Thin White Duke's fiftieth birthday with a duet on the Madison Square Garden stage. The result was a tear-jerking version of “Quicksand”; afterwards, however, Smith complained that he hadn't been allowed to choose the song he sang (he wasn't allowed to do “Young Americans”) and, having become enamoured of the electronic sounds of Bowie's latest album, “Earthling”, temporarily poached Mark Plati and Reeves Gabrels from him to craft his own take on it: the resulting track, though, is far from thrilling.

On Bloodflowers (touted as a return to the climate of Disintegration) the decision to set aside commercial temptations and focus on delicate, lyrical ballads like “Out Of This World” and “Last Day Of Summer” is instead commendable, but the chaotic ten minutes of “Watching Me Fall”, with Smith shrieking and over the top, proves to be a debacle, not softened by the singer's stated attempt to pay homage to Mogwai's “Young Team”. The 2001 single “Cut Here”, on the other hand, is a tribute to Billy Mackenzie, singer of the Associates (labelmates of the Cure on Fiction Records), who died by suicide in 1997.

The Greatest Hits collection containing the track is a rather disappointing anthology, one that fails to surpass the excellent Standing On The Beach compilation, released in 1986, which gathered all the band's classic singles.

With the party-time mood of the Nineties - never very conducive to British unease - now faded, the gloomy climate of the 2000s seems to favour a return to the nervy introspection of the old wave. It's the acclaim of new generations of musicians, as well as the general new wave revival mood, that spurs the band's 2004 comeback, which sees the Cure touring alongside Mogwai, Interpol and The Rapture.

What's striking about The Cure is the physical energy of the performances and Smith's rediscovered vocal verve, more than the individual songs themselves, which unleash stunning rock broadsides in cases like "Lost", "Labyrinth" and "The Promise", only to make one pine for the old acoustic swooning on the two minutes of "Going Nowhere". "Lost" is a hysterical crescendo that quotes an old improvised piece, "Forever", with which the Cure used to close their shows in the Eighties, changing it every night.

What's surprising is the sound, harsh enough to rival Nine Inch Nails. "Labyrinth" dusts off the old pounding rhythms and builds its relentless crescendo on an oriental riff, with Smith's voice first processed with effects and then unleashed in all its fury above the instruments. "The Promise" succeeds where an earlier attempt failed, building a long (ten-minute), flowing track, though it leans on a quote from the old "The Kiss" in its wah-wah storm. The electronic arrangement of "Anniversary" is perhaps the most interesting thing here, precisely because it's foreign to Ross Robinson's furies, and because it points to a path Smith could have convincingly followed, had he chosen the right collaborators.

Overall, the album seems to oscillate between the ability to recast old ideas in a more contemporary context and the risk of slipping into a pathetic attempt to blend in with the younger generation of emo kids.

The Cure's more atmospheric and less conventional side also surfaces on the gargantuan compilation Join The Dots. B Sides And Rarities 1978-2001 (The Fiction Years), a quadruple box set released in 2004 that proves the quality of many tracks discarded by the band over the course of its long history, including the romantic "Twilight Garden", inexplicably dropped from Wish.

Among the many reissues of recent years, worth noting is also "Blue Sunshine" by The Glove, the bizarre project set up by Smith and Steve Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1983, paying tribute to Sixties psychedelia (the "Glove" is a character from the Beatles film "Yellow Submarine"). For contractual reasons, Smith only sings on two tracks, while the others are handled by a total unknown; still, the album is a genuine Cure apocryphon and well worth a listen, and the reissue also features all the tracks re-sung by the tireless man himself in 2005.

While for almost every rocker, as for revolutionaries, the old saying seems to hold true - you're born an arsonist and die a fireman - the Cure have followed a singular path: having started out with a stripped-down formula, measured to the point of exasperation, almost penitential, only in their later years did they turn into something they had never been in their youth, namely a rock band quite pleased with itself for being one.

On 4:13 Dream, from 2008, they revive the drive of the previous record and take care to add a guitarist with ideas (the returning Paul Thompson, who had left the band around the time of Wish) and a handful of good songs: the atmospheric overture of "Underneath The Stars" (a "Plainsong" for the new millennium?), the sinister crescendo of "The Scream", the hysterical outburst of "It's Over", and the oblique pop of "Sleep When I'm Dead" and "Freakshow", on which Thompson lets loose with unrestrained wah-wah effects.

Unfortunately, part of the record is given over to a rather bland and harmless pop-rock, though there are no horrors on the level of The Cure, thanks in part to the lean, guitar-centred arrangements that keep keyboards and kitsch sounds in check. Thompson's guitar still manages to give the sound a rock authenticity that was almost entirely missing from the previous three records, and this holds true even for the lighter, more delicate tracks, which don't need to turn into an all-out knife fight just to prove that the Cure are still here and still fighting alongside us.

In 2010 the Cure celebrated the twentieth anniversary of one of their classics with a lavish reissue: Disintegration Deluxe Edition.

After more than 40 years in the business, it's hard to say what still drives Robert Smith to write songs and, above all, to obsessively tread concert stages, almost as if the Cure were competing with U2 for the title of "Rolling Stones of new wave". Of course, while the tradition of English melancholy carried on beyond him (triumphing with Radiohead), the Cure's singer managed to carve out a world of his own, as unsettling as it is consoling, to which a certain kind of audience still seems to return for solace and comfort. To understand the reasons behind the myth, though, one has to look back, to how Smith and his bandmates appeared in the 1986 video-concert "The Cure In Orange", filmed in Provence at the Théâtre Antique d'Orange: freewheeling visionaries, lost on the fragile border between dreams and nightmares, between solitude and love, between sin and innocence.

Promised as far back as 2019 and finally announced, complete with a cleverly orchestrated online countdown, Songs Of A Lost World finally arrived on November 1, 2024, the hugely anticipated comeback album from the Cure after 16 years. Good news, in any case, for those who have kept their passion for Robert Smith's band alive all these years, perhaps thanks to his sprawling, ever-satisfying live rituals. And it was precisely on stage, during the worldwide Shows of a Lost World tour, that this new record - their fourteenth studio album - took shape. Five of the eight tracks ("Alone", "A Fragile Thing", "And Nothing Is Forever", "I Can Never Say Goodbye" and "Endsong") in fact had their genesis live and were later reworked in the studio - almost always coming out better for it, it has to be said.

But although the surprise factor was somewhat dampened by that early exposure on stage, when fans were finally able to hit "play" on "Alone" - the first single, unveiled on September 26 alongside the official album announcement - the emotion was overwhelming. Maybe it was down to that outsized three-minute-twenty instrumental intro - absurd and utterly out of step with the age of Spotify and disposable playlists - maybe it was the interweaving of reverb-soaked guitars and synths, maybe it was Smith's liberating cry ("This is the end of every song that we sing") that finally kicks the song into gear, but for once that sense of déjà vu turned into a genuine gut-punch. Dark, epic, orchestral, "Alone" is only a mirage of a great new Cure song, but it fully lived up to its role as a trailblazer, managing to stir up a collective emotion with real sincerity, straight from the heart. And this is perhaps the very trait most to be appreciated on a record whose main point of reference is above all Disintegration, so much so that it could be called a sequel or a collection of outtakes from it, depending on how you feel about the eight tracks on the tracklist. The underlying concept is a reflection on the disorientation of living in a world of alienation and loneliness, which ends up turning into a kind of cathartic rite, an emotional exorcism on the subject of ending. At 65, carrying the heavy burden of loss (his parents and his brother Richard), Smith has changed his outlook: "My songs have always had that element, the fear of mortality," he explained. "It's always been there, ever since I was young. But as you get older, it becomes more real." "I Can Never Say Goodbye", dedicated to his beloved brother Richard, opens with another long (two-minute) intro featuring the sound of a thunderstorm preluding delicate piano chimes, telling the story of their last evening together. No less mournful - and certainly more powerful than the live version - is the lullaby of "And Nothing Is Forever", cradled by piano, strings and then swelling guitars.

The musical distinctiveness of the record lies above all in recapturing the sonic density of the Cure of the late Eighties and early Nineties, those grainy, dissonant textures that fuelled the instrumental grandeur of tracks both tense and solemn: "Drone:NoDrone" and "Warsong" venture into those clouds of feedback, reverb and distortion, though without ever quite recapturing the intensity of their natural forebears. The former recounts Smith's unpleasant close encounter with a flying drone spotted above his garden, condensing all his rage at that intrusion into a whirlwind of abrasive electric guitars and distorted bass topped by Smith's furious vocal. The latter opens with a pump organ that almost seems to replicate the intro of "Untitled", before guitars in feedback, drums and disorienting sound effects burst in, mimicking the cyclical conflicts and reconciliations Smith says he's had with someone.

What's missing, on the other hand, are those lighter, breezier pop moments that, from "Why Can't I Be You" to "Lullaby" and "Friday I'm In Love", briefly broke up the density of the sonic pall even on their most atmospheric records. The second single, "A Fragile Thing", comes somewhat close to that, being more concise and catchy, with a shortened intro and jangling guitar lines matching the romantic mood, condensed in Smith's suspended vocal; while "All I Ever Am" stands out for its urgent pace, driven by drums and synths.

The epic closing liturgy of "Endsong" serves as a natural counterpart to the opening of "Alone", with which it shares both its desolate spleen ("It's all gone, it's all gone") and the status of the collection's high point. Written by the Cure's leader in 2019, with his 60th birthday and the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing in mind, it's the perfect way to close the circle and the album (which was originally meant to be titled "Live From The Moon"), with a disconsolate Smith wondering what became of the boy who used to gaze at the moon, reflecting on how the world has by now lost that progressive, optimistic drive toward the future. Ten minutes and thirty seconds dominated by a circular beat and layers of keyboards, over which six-string interplay stands out, with the singer waiting a full six minutes before entering the scene, before handing the final farewell over to a long electric guitar coda.

Songs Of A Lost World is an honest, heartfelt, coherent record. Probably their best since Bloodflowers, even if not quite as inspired as some of us had dreamed, and as some outlets are making it out to be. But perhaps that was too much to ask for after all these years. It's gratifying to see new generations drawn to the world of Robert Smith and co., to see a storied wave institution flourish again, one that has constantly reinvented itself, from the glories of dark to the pop era. Even so, deep down, the nostalgia for our lost world remains: that of the Cure of the golden age, which who knows if and when will ever return.

24 remix versions of Songs Of a Lost World were released in June 2025 on Mixes Of A Lost World. Almost two and a half hours of listening that renew the Cure's not-always-easy relationship with electronic music and the reworking of their own songs, an operation already attempted with decidedly mixed results both on Mixed Up (1990) and on "Torn Down" (2018), projects that most hardcore Cure fans don't look upon too kindly: their purism leads them to consider the originals untouchable. Robert Smith doesn't see it that way: he retains an intact love of exploration, always finding it fascinating to see how the material he composed can take on unpredictably shifting shapes and meanings through the intervention of respected names from the international electronic scene. In this case we're dealing with a monstrous idea: each track has been reworked three times by a truly first-rate line-up. Four Tet, Orbital, Paul Oakenfold, Trentemoller, Chino Moreno of Deftones, Daniel Avery, Mura Masa, Craven Faults, just to name the best-known, with an honourable mention for "our own" JoyCut, who hold their own, bringing a touch of the tricolore thanks to their personal industrial transmutation of "Drone:Nodrone". Everyone brings their own instinct, their own know-how, their own feeling, their own vibrations, their own vision.

The results range from the sleekest balearic deep house to the most pounding techno-house, never losing sight of the song's core, the one hard rule imposed by Robert Smith. We've mentioned some of the best-known artists, who draw attention to the album's content, but one might find oneself particularly struck by the remixes crafted by "second-tier" producers, as in the case of Meera, who handles "All I Ever Am" with excellent results. In the closing stretch of the compilation, some rather notable bands step in, several of which have opened for the Cure on tour in the past. 65daysofstatic, Twilight Sad and Mogwai all lent a hand to the project: the first take on "All I Ever Am", the second on "A Fragile Thing", while Mogwai wrap "Endsong" in a post-rock texture, the best possible farewell. The Cure's darkwave, always so tied to the imagery of the Eighties, reimagined through some of today's digital avant-garde, finds a second, a third, a fourth life, new horizons to expand endlessly into, eventually landing in territories that once seemed unimaginable. The results aren't always up to par, some versions remain faithful to the originals, others carry out a much sharper revision of the original concept, but the record holds together despite the varied nature of its contributions.

Contributions by Claudio Fabretti ("Songs Of A Lost World") and Claudio Lancia ("Mixes Of A Lost World")

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