There’s something hauntingly beautiful about the triumphant return of The Cure. It’s a crazy time for fans — out of all the fandoms in pop history, this is one of the most bizarrely long-lived, multi-generational, and infallible. Robert Smith and his band of nostalgic Englishmen will be on tour for the next few months, performing music for the first time from their long-awaited album, Songs From a Lost World, which is so anticipated it doesn’t even exist. Is the biggest rock tour of the year the goth guy who sang ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ 40 years ago? No one could have predicted such a future for this band—not even Smith.
But no one hates The Cure anymore, something that once seemed an important part of the fandom’s identity. Smith has never lost her aura of nervous angst with her dripping eyeliner, smudged red lipstick, and sticky bat-black hair. He always feels like a mischievous kid who just got caught playing with his mom’s makeup. For a tortured genius who used to be one of music’s most controversial figures, he really fits into the role of a universally beloved grandpa, everyone’s favorite gothic auntie. Whimsical like angels, perfect like cats, but always themselves.
Smith will be touring the US at the same time as his longtime friend and bandmate, Siouxsie Sioux, plays his first show in a decade. Throw in a Love and Rockets reunion and you have one year of gothic icons. Standing in a field full of strangers singing about soul-crushing loneliness may sound contradictory, but that’s the essence of being a Cure fan. It’s been 15 years since his last album, but his music is timeless. The band that broke the world is the band that will never break.
The last time Smith released new music on 2004’s (great) The Cure and 2008’s (not-so-great) 4:13 Dream, he was in search of abstract pop; But Lost World is deep and heavy. The 6-piece band has evolved into a black enamel monster that plays marathon shows. Last year they toured Europe, debuting 5 Lost World songs, including the powerful ‘Endsong’ and ‘Alone’, which builds on itself as Smith laments about 10 minutes of rock, “Some No hope, no dream, no world / No, I’m not here anymore”. He ends the song with a farewell, “there’s nothing left at the end of each song”.
Smith has spent years promising that the new album is almost ready, one of these days, he promises it. (“It’ll be worth the wait,” he said backstage at an award show in London last year. “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, but that’s definitely what I’ll say.”) It’s something like What loyal fans have been waiting for. As he told Rolling Stone the last time he released new music in 2008, “I got the sound of Deadline going over the top of my head.” He always makes us wait, he always promises it’s the best thing he’s ever done, and he always swears it’ll be the last thing he’ll do. A few years ago, he said it would be like disbanding, except with songs that “lightened the mood”, and he wasn’t even kidding.
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Longevity didn’t seem to be on the table for this band. By the time The Cure released their 1986 greatest hits album, Standing on a Beach, one expert estimated that Robert Smith had died over the lyrics of his music 74 times. It already seemed strange that these three imaginary boys (Tres Niños Imaginarios) had lasted so long, especially since their short-tempered leader was always threatening to give up on his musical career. As he said in 1996, “I’m going to be 40 in April 1999 and I think it would be awesome to start a new millennium while still in a band called The Cure. I can’t imagine doing it. I I’ll be scared.” Just before his birthday, he wrote a song called ’39’, in which he laments, “the fire’s nearly out, and there’s nothing left to burn”, but it turns out that it was nowhere near ending. was not. This man never stops. It really is a twisted obsession to sing “I wish I’d slept tonight” every night for four decades.
Initially making bluesy soufflés such as Faith, Pornography and Seventeen Seconds, they later decided to branch out into music. He’s never been the kind of rocker to pretend he didn’t want to be famous. “I decided to be a pop star,” he told Rolling Stone in 2004. “It’s So Ridiculous That I’m Going From Gothic Idol to Pop Star in Three Easy Lessons.” They hit it off on the first effort with 1982’s “Let’s Go to Bed,” a wistful synth-pop ballad about a couple staying up all night talking about how unhappy they are. “All of a sudden ‘Let’s Go to Bed’ was becoming a huge hit, especially on the West Coast, and we had a young, predominantly female audience,” he continued. “I go to people with white teeth full of intense, threatening, mental goths. It was a very strange change, but I enjoyed it. I found it very funny.”
This tour has brought out that tremendous side of him, which we rarely get to see. He is one of the few artists to speak out about Ticketmaster and how getting concert tickets has become absolute hell. He kept ticket prices low for this tour, opting for “dynamic pricing”, only to see Ticketmaster double the cost with additional fees. “I’m just as frustrated with Ticketmaster’s fees as all of you.” He got a minimal refund for his fans, but there’s something touching about his willingness to get his hands dirty.
One of the perennial conundrums for fans is: How can Smith reign as rock’s final scourge of romantic despair when he’s been happily married to his childhood sweetheart for decades? But that is just one of the artistic masks he wears, like his makeup. As he said in the 1990s, “people’s notion of me that I am not an adult, living in a fantasy world and walking around London in my pajamas quoting Baudelaire, is not true”. (He explained that this was not true because he lived by the sea, not in London. “Now I walk the beach, Baudelaire quotes the waves!” And so he is Robert Smith.)
“I could die of a broken heart tonight,” he sings in one of his new songs, ‘A Fragile Thing,’ even though as Al Pacino would say in The Godfather Part II, he died of the same broken heart years later. Used to be . He ends up alone on most of his songs – especially on ‘Just Like Heaven’, his most famous song, a wedding hit, even though it’s a love story with an incredibly sad ending that leaves Robert long Leaves you stuck in your misery till the time. , Somehow, the emotional devastation still feels cathartic. If it’s a paradox, it’s one that fans of The Cure feel right at home with.
