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Robert Smith Is a Big Ol’ Book Nerd

Tracking the not-so-hidden literary references on the Cure’s new album.

The band’s very first single, 1978’s controversially titled “Killing an Arab,” is a riff on Albert Camus’s The Stranger, in which a then-20-year-old Smith attempts to condense a few key scenes from the novella into a post-punk portrait of apathy. After struggling to find the right words to open the album, he perused an old notebook and found that some younger version of himself had transcribed the poem “Dregs,” by Ernest Dowson, a 19th-century English poet who met a tragic end at 32 after his father died of tuberculosis and his mother hanged herself. Over swelling strings and a treacly piano motif, Smith sings about his world growing old and holding someone for the last time in “the dying of the light.” That last bit, of course, is from Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” about resisting death even when you’re at its threshold.

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