Songs of a Lost World
Moving on from last week's feelings of uncertainty and despair by writing about the certainty of despair.
This is the end of every song that we sing
The fire burned out to ash, and the stars grown dim with tears
Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we've been
We toast with bitter dregs, to our emptiness
With immediate hindsight, The Cure betrayed a sick sense of timing in choosing November of 2024 to release an emotionally crippling album called Songs of a Lost World.
Initially the confluence was a more joyfully superficial one - a long-delayed start to autumn finally occurred after Halloween in Atlanta, with gray skies and a drop in temperature greeting me the very day the album dropped. It felt like the earth itself was settling in to the appropriate mood. I was able to listen to and form a relationship with the record before the events of November 5th, though it now feels depressingly linked to that day as the recency of its release and its utter hopelessness made it a constant presence for the week following. I would of course rather the album not be so deeply associated with the point at which America doubled-down on its tin-pot Mussolini, but we play the cards we are dealt rather than the ones that we need1.
Certainly Robert Smith is singing about more personal apocalypses on this release, dealing as it does with feelings of hopelessness, alienation, and heartache that of course mark his whole career but which here gain further heft from the weight of encroaching mortality. No one has ever made despair so comforting, and the despair has never been deeper than it is here - and this from a man who 30 years ago ended an album by saying
I think I've reached that point
Where giving up and going on
Are both the same dead end to me
Are both the same old song
The Cure, like Pearl Jam, are a band that has been there for me as a comfort since pre-adolescence. There are no extra points for guessing which life events have most often driven me back to songs like From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, A Letter to Elise, or Pictures of You, and yet their power and their value have long transcended the sometime-necessary but always short-lived immediacy of conciliatory lament. Their lush compositions have always felt like the warm embrace of the first cold day of the year, when the sweet smell of rotting leaves starts to float in the air and everyone begins to ease into a sense of shared melancholy.
It is this sense of communal suffering that resonates so deeply, that can be applied to so many stations and circumstances in one’s own life, and that makes this album such a comfort even as it rips you open and leaves you scraped clean.
Because like all pain, it reminds you that you’re alive.
"And there's nothing you can do to change it back, " she said
"Nothing you can do but sing, this love is a fragile thing
Nothing you can do now but pretend again"
The extra ingredient this time, though, is that Robert Smith is now, at 65, closer to the end of his life and, as a result, the flirtations with death that read as Romantic on earlier records are here much more sobering in their immediacy.
Why is this so affirming?
Aside from the obvious - he has taken the darkest of feelings and crafted from them an album full of beautiful songs, which inherently testifies to the innate power and transcendent nature of creativity in his life2 - I would say that there is a comfort in the constancy. Smith, whose voice has not changed one bit in the decades since the band’s debut, stands equally staunch in his unyielding despair and bears it out in his lyrics and through his performance on the record. In a culture that treasures youth above all, which mandates optimism in the face of all of the world’s horrors, and which insists on empowerment at all costs, there is something of a palliative in having an artist stand on the other side of life and say, “Actually things are not only still bad but may have gotten worse.”
Because it’s honest. It’s authentic. It speaks to things that one struggles with day-to-day, chiefly the question of how one can at the same time feel completely fulfilled to a degree which they never have before and yet at the same time can feel the pang from, and mourn the versions of, themselves that never came to be or who have passed into eternity.
And I'm outside in the dark
Staring at the blood red moon
Remembering the hopes and dreams I had
And all I had to do
And wondering what became of that boy
And the world he called his own
I'm outside in the dark
Wondering how I got so old
The curse of being someone who looked a generation above them for their musical icons is that they burn out or fade away all the quicker. The bands which defined my adolescence are now looking back at lives that they are now starting to be able to frame as complete. This is the first Cure album in 16 years. Once that same timeframe has elapsed once again, I will be standing on the threshold of my 58th year. While Smith has teased two more imminent albums, he has also said that the band will end for good in 2028, when he will be 70.
We’re distressingly close to this finality coming for all of the bands I’ve held most dear for the majority of my life. It would be a grossly melodramatic overstatement for me to claim this as some sort of premature end for myself, and yet it does presage by a few decades where I - where we all - will end up. And perhaps that’s the biggest comfort at all - that when the time comes to make a final statement, to face the prospect of the end head-on, that I will at the very least, like The Cure, still be on my feet and able and willing to do so with full honesty and with a completely open heart, still pulsing with the sense that they made the most of what they got no matter how it all ended up.
-cs
A bitter confluence: I saw The Cure live for the first and, up to now, only time in 2016. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen - they played every song I wanted to hear - but it was also August in Georgia and we had lawn seats, and so were maybe the hottest we have ever been. Every bit of stage patter Robert Smith had that night was about how miserably hot it was.
Remember that Samuel Beckett insisted, after all, that if he were a pessimist he wouldn’t be able to write.