3 of the Best Tracks From The Cure’s New Album ‘Songs of a Lost World’

The Cure released their first album after a 16-year hiatus, Songs of a Lost World, and the sound is classic Cure with a present day reflection. After spending some time with the album, here are three of the best tracks from the new offering.

Songs of a Lost World starts out with the six-minute track “Alone,” but it’s the third track that really gets things going. “A Fragile Thing” has a slick bassline that revs up into a shiny cymbal roll in the beginning of the song. What makes this song interesting lyrically is that it’s written as a conversation, however one-sided. “Every time you kiss me I could cry,” she said, the song starts, stating that there’s someone speaking these lines. It then flows into a longer statement, “Don’t tell me how you miss me, I could die tonight of a broken heart / This loneliness has changed me and we’ve been too far apart… continuing from there.

Looking at the lyrics, most of them are in quotation marks, noting the conversation. Overall, it’s an interesting way to convey a heartbreak from a different perspective.

“Warsong” is a delightfully heavier track with solemn lyrics and shreddy noise over it all that brings home the sense that something is deeply wrong with the portrayed relationship. This is about fighting and not making up: No way for us to find a way to peace / We never found before / However we regret / All we will ever know is bitter ends. The last line, For we were born to war, highlights the volatile nature of the unknown characters. They’ve only ever known misery and toxicity, which will never change.

[RELATED: How Robert Smith’s Wife Mary Helped Finish the Cure’s ‘Songs of a Lost World’]

The Cure’s First Album in 16 Years Delivers a Delightfully Familiar Sound

“I Can Never Say Goodbye” was first debuted live in 2022, but the studio version appears on The Cure’s new album. The song was written about Robert Smith’s older brother, Richard, who passed away, and creates “a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died,” Smith said in a recent interview, via Billboard.

According to Smith, he wrote this song several different ways before landing on the one on the album. “It went all around the houses and I went everywhere with this song to sum up how I felt. In the end, it turned into a reasonably bleak little vignette,” he said.

I am down on my knees and empty inside / Something wicked this way comes / From out the cruel and treacherous night / Something wicked this way comes / To steal away my brother’s life, Smith sings. However, while the lyrics are important, Smith said the music is what he wanted to convey his emotions.

“I wrote the song about it, and the music itself was what I wanted to breathe,” he said. “I didn’t want the words to dominate the song, in a way that the music can become a backdrop to what you’re singing. In this, I think the music is more important than what I’m singing in a way. It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”

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