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The Cure: Songs of a Lost World review – dark, personal and their best since Disintegration

The band are at an artistic peak on their first album in 16 years: movingly melancholic, with a punchy sound to match the lyrics’ emotional impact

In a video accompanying the arrival of Songs of a Lost World, Robert Smith’s explanation of what happened in the 16 years since the last album involves a complex mass of abandoned recording sessions, rash promises about release dates and personal upheaval: his brother, sister and “all my remaining aunties and uncles” died. Its songs variously find Smith mourning, staring down his own mortality – “my weary dance with age and resignation moves me slow towards a dark and empty stage” – and lost in reflection about a past that feels more appealing than the baleful and divisive atmosphere of the present day. Their detractors have sometimes painted the Cure as a band trapped in a kind of teenage worldview: “a passion play of adolescent melancholy … the voice of nervous boredom in a small-town bedroom, peevish and petulant,” as the cultural critic Michael Bracewell once wrote in a withering analysis.

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