The Cure, review: perversely uplifting in its nihilism and the best thing since their debut

Strangulated power: Robert Smith
Strangulated power: Robert Smith - Sarah Jeynes

It has taken 16 years for Goth hero Robert Smith to craft The Cure’s 14th album, Songs of a Lost World. During that time, the 65-year-old band leader has grappled with the deaths of close friends and family members (including a beloved elder brother, Richard), pushing his notoriously gloomy song and sound craft into ever darker terrain. These eight long and emotional songs tackle relationship conflict (A Fragile Thing, Warsong), severe mental health problems (Drone: Nodrone, All I Ever Am), anxiety about the future (Alone) and a profound existential crisis (Endsong).

The song titles alone imply the darkest of narratives, with Smith addressing his sibling’s demise on the epically bereft And Nothing Is Forever and elegiacally sad I Can Never Say Goodbye. The phrase “the end” appears 11 times in the lyrics, the word “nothing” is sung 22 times. Indeed, the album opens (after almost three minutes of churning chords that resemble a gothic funereal procession) with Smith plaintively singing “This is the end of every song we sing”, and closes with Smith invoking “the end of every song / Left alone with nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

The sheer weight of depressive emotion seems to have been a significant factor in the long delay of Lost World’s completion. It features the belated debut of dazzlingly inventive former Bowie guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who has been a Cure member for 14 years. The current six-piece lineup went into the studio to start work in 2018. Over subsequent years, Smith admitted to struggling to contextualise an album that was, by his own reckoning, “very, very doom and gloom.” His answer, ultimately, has been to embrace the pitch blackness, delivering the doomiest, gloomiest set of his doomy, gloomy career.

For which we should be thankful. Because the result is monumental, arguably Smith’s finest work since the early trio years of post-punk art rock (The Cure’s fantastic 1979 debut Three Imaginary Boys and coruscating 1980 follow-up Seventeen Seconds), rivalling 1982’s Pornography for brooding splendour, yet retaining elements of the popcraft that weave so beautifully through 1989’s Disintegration and 1992’s Wish.

The immense sound of Lost World is driven by Jason Cooper’s thunderous drum patterns underpinned by Simon Gallops’s gnarly bass. Going against the modern streaming trend for sound separation and simplicity, every sonic space is unfashionably filled with waves of thick synths crashing against piano motifs whilst Gabrels’ and Smith’s guitars echo and clang in an angst-filled wall of sound.

Smith’s strangulated voice, so fragile yet melodious, perfectly evokes the raw passions of his despairing lyrics. Crucially, set against the crushing sonic weight is a countervailing buoyancy in the prettiness of Smith’s melodies. All I Ever Am may be the poppiest song of abject despair and mental disintegration ever conceived.

Surprisingly, this is not a depressing listening experience. There is something so cathartically bleak about Songs of a Lost World, so epically pessimistic and emotionally wrought, that the results are perversely invigorating, transmuting powerful feelings of loss, grief, anxiety, anger and self-doubt into a work of such grandeur it leaves the listener strangely exhilarated and uplifted. Like shaking a fist at an approaching hurricane, it is an album that’s very existence evokes defiance of terrible forces of destruction. In embracing darkness, Smith offers a potent Cure for the blues. Neil McCormick

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Last outlaw standing: Willie Nelson
Last outlaw standing: Willie Nelson - Pamela Springsteen

Willie Nelson: Last Leaf on the Tree ★★★★☆

With the passing of Kris Kristofferson in September, Willie Nelson became the only surviving member The Highwaymen, the original outlaw country supergroup he formed with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. Earlier this year, Nelson himself was reported to be in hospital, with family members asking fans to pray for the 91-year-old singer-songwriter. Yet by July he was back onstage performing concerts, in October he was singing at a rally for US presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and now here he is with his 76th studio album. As he sings with wry defiance in a tremulous, ancient voice on the title track: “I’m the last leaf on the tree / The autumn took the rest / But they won’t take me.”

The song was written by Tom Waits for his 2011 album Bad as Me but is gorgeously transformed in Nelson’s performance, not so much sung in amused denial of death as in celebration of the immortal spirit of music itself. “I’ll be here through eternity / If you want to know how long / If they cut down this tree / I’ll show up in a song.” And here he is, indeed, showing up in a whole set of great songs once again.

Elegantly produced by his 31-year-old son Mica Nelson, The Last Leaf is another late career masterwork from a man evidently determined to go out singing. This is Nelson’s 18th album in 10 years, and second of 2024. Like many of his recent releases, it is bathed in qualities of ancient grace, a tender, philosophical, sometimes humorous looking back at life and forward towards death that reflects his advancing years, yet it also sounds astonishingly contemporary. Or perhaps it is timeless: a set of cover songs so perfectly arranged, played and performed they could never go out of date.

Micah has pushed his father beyond a comfortable country oldie zone into some surprising places, whether digging out the philosophical essence of The Flaming Lips’ psychedelic epic Do You Realize?? or crystallising the weary heart of Beck’s Lost Cause. The framing of Nelson’s still tuneful but airy and cracked voice is gorgeous, with instruments weaving and whispering around him in a ghostly shimmer, a wheeze of accordion, a shiver and sigh of ethereal pedal steel guitar, a tumbling rumble of percussion. It is reminiscent of the atmospheric work Daniel Lanois did with Bob Dylan in the nineties, and notable that Lanois is playing pedal steel in the small ensemble. Micah contributes guitars, bass, piano, cello, dulcimer and Andean lute as well as joining in with percussion, with John Densmore of the Doors behind the drum kit keeping things gently tumbling. Everything is crystal clear yet understated, with Nelson’s famous guitar Trigger rippling and tickling his Django Reinhardt jazz country licks throughout.

It is not a sentimental album. Willie sells the hard-boiled sting of Keith Richards’s Robbed Blind and brings a bittersweet tang to Warren Zevon’s Keep Me In Your Heart. The pick of an excellent collection might be If It Wasn’t Broken, originally by obscure folk punk singer-songwriter Sunny War, which in Nelson’s delivery becomes an anthem of life lived to the full: “How would you know you had a heart / If it wasn’t broken?”

The only misstep is a playful version of Buffalo Springfield’s psychedelic whimsy Broken Arrow, yet in a way it adds to a sense of this album as a living experience between father and son happily trading guitar licks rather than a valedictory swansong. One of the greatest songwriters of his time, there is only one new offering from Willie, The Color of Sound (composed with Micah), on which Nelson embraces the mysteries of eternity with a song in his heart: “Listen / Here comes that silence again / Listen / The golden nothing …” If this was the last offering from the last outlaw standing, it would be a glorious way to bow out, but there is nothing here to suggest the great man is ready to hang up his guitar yet. Neil McCormick


Chromakopia, Tyler the Creator ★★★★☆

When Tyler the Creator made his mainstream breakthrough back in 2011 with Yonkers – a gloomy punk rap song where he promised to “stab Bruno Mars in his goddamn oesophagus”, ate a real cockroach in the music video, and was subsequently banned from entering the UK to perform by the then-home secretary, Theresa May, for “homophobic, hate-inciting lyrics” – there was a feeling hip hop had gained an eternal anarchist.

His artistic transformation over the past 13 years has been fascinating to observe. With 2017’s conceptual album Flower Boy, a career-best, Tyler seemed to meditatively “come out” over psychedelic soul reminiscent of The Isley Brothers. On 2019’s Igor, Tyler traced the roller-coaster ride of a break-up, the songs unsure if they longed for soppy reconciliation or a bitterness akin to Marvin Gaye’s infamous divorce LP, Hear My Dear. Now with eighth album Chromakopia, Tyler turns further inwards, dissecting the flawed human being behind an edgy rap persona. Amid tribal howls and a fidgety, battle-ready guitar riff reminiscent of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, Tyler uses the brash Noid to complain about the pitfalls of celebrity. “I just want to eat in peace”, he raps, “Privacy, right? I got a better shot in the NBA.”

The soundscapes of the other songs are more sedate, particularly the soul-cushioning, Beach Boys-esque harmonies present in both Judge Judy and Hey Jane. On the latter, Tyler admits to being selfish and “not in the space to raise no goddamn child.” This is a record that nails the angst of early 30s, when the world is trying to rush you into settling down while your inner child is itching to keep the party going.

Tyler’s mischievousness isn’t totally absent, with the stomping bassline of the circus-ready Sticky containing a deliciously baiting bar about how “I don’t give a f--- about pronouns, I’m that n---a and I’m that bitch.” On the whole, however, this feels like Tyler’s piano ballad album, allowing for a vulnerability we haven’t fully heard from him before. Throughout are tender voice notes from Tyler’s mother, one revealing that his father didn’t abandon him as a child, instead she chose to cut him out of her son’s life. You feel like a fly on the wall of a revealing therapy session.

Chromakopia isn’t perfect. In moments, it becomes too saccharine, particularly with the tooth-achingly twee track Darling. But then you hear Take Your Mask Off, on which Tyler bluntly raps about male Hollywood-based celebrities who hide their sexuality from their wives. When he then takes aim at rappers who fake their street credibility despite enjoying middle-class childhoods (probably a diss towards Drake), you’re reminded that there are few major label emcees still capable of such honesty. Thomas Hobbs