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The Cure: Songs of a Lost World review – as promised, ‘very, very doom and gloom’

The band’s first album in 16 years finds Robert Smith and co on reliably melancholy form – with the exception of one out-and-out pop banger

The Cure have long dwelled in a kind of rarefied artistic blue zone in which the years pile up but the end of the band is serenely defied – maybe due to a diet rich in red wine, combined with a dogged aversion to modernity. The album’s cover does away with the squiggly artwork long favoured by the band, to be replaced by a lump of half-formed granite: Bagatelle, a 1975 work by Janez Pirnat, redolent of a damaged classical sculpture rescued from beneath the waves. Throughout their history, the Cure have very often bucked the gothic thumbnail sketch of their output by rotating through crisp post-punk (the early years), romantic whimsy (the pop songs) and wild psychedelic disarray ( Pornography).

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