Friday 1 November 2024, All Saint’s Day, was the worldwide release date for The Cure’s new album Songs of a Lost World. A very special release day, as it is the band’s first new studio album in sixteen years!
I like to keep up my old ritual of buying a physical copy of a new Cure album from my local record store on the day it is released. So on this very appropriate grey and foggy morning, I went to the Plato record store in my hometown Utrecht, which has just moved to bigger premises.
Apparently I was a bit early (though not usually an early riser), because they were still filling the shelves. I turned out to be the second person to buy the new Cure album, as I was told. In this store I bought the ‘retail exclusive 1 LP marble stone’ edition. This edition is pressed on grey marbled vinyl. Lines from Endsong ‘outside in the dark’ (A) and ‘left alone with nothing’ (B) are etched into the runout grooves. It looks really wonderful. Like other variations it comes with a poster of the cover art. What made it even better was that I got a promo canvas with my purchase. Thank you Plato!
Doom & gloom
As we all know the album was a long time in the making. New interviews with Robert Smith have shed some light on the creative process. It seems that until quite recently (this year?) Robert held on to the idea of making a ‘relentless doom and gloom’ album. It would have thirteen or so tracks, lasting over an hour.
To Huw Stephens and Jo Whiley of the BBC, he revealed that at some point he had people close to him, particularly his wife Mary, listen to the running order he had in mind. She told him this might be ‘too much’. So he decided to cut it down and replace some songs with a different energy to make it more listenable. Of course this makes me even more curious about that original track listing! Maybe something for the re-issue in 2040.
These seemingly late changes might also explain why the booklet of the CD edition still contains lyrics for a song called Bodiam Sky. This ultimatley did not end up on this album. It might be on the next, as Robert explained to Matt Everitt in the extensive interview originally published on The Cure’s website.
Anyway, one of these late replacements is the song All I Ever Am. At first listen it is my favourite of the three songs that we didn’t know yet from the Shows of a Lost World tour. So maybe it was a good decision after all. And, despite the changes, the new album is definitely still the most cohesive selection of songs since Bloodflowers (2000) in terms of sound, atmosphere, pace and lyrical themes (loss, age, change). Which is a good thing.
Musically, Songs of a Lost World is indeed on the darker side of the spectrum, as Robert predicted. A bit in the same vein as Disintegration and Bloodflowers. Soundwise, I like that it has more predominant keyboards again. Like on Alone, which has been beautifully recorded. So, my first impression is that this is a very good album. There are already songs among them that touch me in a nostalgic way. Maybe this will be the album I was hoping they would make one more time.
dutch connections
As for the Dutch connections (because that’s what this blog is about) around this release, a nice detail is that the 12″ Novembre – Live in France 2022, which served as a sort of appetiser for the album, was mastered by Dutchman Johanz Westerman. He wrote a nice post about his history with The Cure on his Facebook page. He said that as a teenager he loved Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. And that he first saw Robert Smith at the Pandora’s Music Box Festival in Rotterdam in 1983. This must have been when Robert was guitarist with Siouxsie & the Banshees.
This record was also manufactured in the Netherlands by Green Vinyl Records. The label Naked has a mission to release eco-friendly vinyl records to help fight climate change. 100% of the net profits from this record go to Brian Eno’s EarthPercent charity. Naked posted a nice video about the story of this 12″.
Furthermore, when Robert acknowledged the role of the BBC in their career to Huw Stephens on BBC Radio 6, he also mentioned that Holland used to have a radio station kind of similar to the BBC. Indeed, (some) Dutch public broadcasting associations used to play good and exciting music on ‘Hilversum 3’. They were also very much supportive of The Cure in their early years. Among other things, by broadcasting many of their concerts on radio and television, including Rotterdam 1979, Amsterdam 1979, Arnhem 1980, Veenendaal 1980, Apeldoorn 1980, Amsterdam 1980, Den Bosch 1981 etc.
charts
As a nod to the good old days, in a recently revived Dutch sort of alternative radio charts from the 1980s (compiled by listeners), The Cure had their first number 1 since Lullaby in 1989 with the album’s opening song Alone. But even more surprisingly, in terms of sales-based charts, The Cure had a Dutch premiere a week after its release (update 9 November). Songs of a Lost World entered the official Dutch album top 100 at number 1! This has never happened before. I was thinking it could be partly due to idiots like me buying multiple editions. Even then, only in the 1980s did The Cure reach Top 10 album positions in the Netherlands with Faith (9), The Head on the Door (3), Standing on a Beach (6), Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (3) and Disintegration (3). Quite a historical achievement for a band’s first studio album in sixteen years.