Smith, taking a break from the book with a quick comic.
Photo: Andy Freeberg/Getty Images

If you couldn’t tell from everything about him, Robert Smith is a bookworm, the kind of person who used the pandemic as an excuse to read the entire 26-book oeuvre of John le Carré and finally tackle War and peace. (He didn’t care much for the latter.) As The Cure’s frontman and primary songwriter, Smith has never been shy about taking unabashed lyrical inspiration from his favorite books and poems. The band’s first single, from 1978, controversially titled “Killing an Arab”, is an Albert Camus riff. The strangerin which Smith, then 20 years old, attempts to condense some key scenes from the novel into a post-punk portrait of apathy. Since then, each Cure album has offered a glimpse into whatever bookish concoction of angst and euphoria is swirling in Smith’s mind at any given moment. There is even a full website dedicated to tracing literary references in Cure songs.

Last week, The Cure returned with their first album in 16 years. Songs of a lost world. It should be noted that it is only Cure’s second album (after 1985). head at the door) in which Smith has sole writing credit for each song, a feat that apparently wasn’t easy. “It’s something that as I’ve gotten older I’ve found a lot harder to do: write words that I want to sing,” the 65-year-old said. he told the BBC. With a little help from his literary inspirations, he finally found some he liked. did I want to sing, and the result is the band’s best album in decades: a patient, richly textured meditation on death and the passage of time.

Regardless of how age has changed him, much of Smith’s makeup remains the same, and lost world brings with it a classically Smithian avalanche of literary and historical reference points, some of which I probably missed. Below are the ones I caught.

Smith has described “Alone”: the impressive and Disintegration-esque opener for Songs of a new world – like the song that opened the entire album. After struggling to find the right words to open the album, he examined an old notebook and discovered that a younger version of himself had transcribed the poem. “Stool,” by Ernest Dowson, a 19th-century English poet who met a tragic end at age 32 after his father died of tuberculosis and his mother hanged herself. (Did you think Smith I wouldn’t do it Will he be attracted to scandalously unlucky poets?) Like “Alone,” “Dregs” fights against oblivion, ghosts of the past and “the end of every song that man sings.” Perhaps a century from now, “Alone” will pay it forward by freeing another lonely poet from writer’s block.

“It doesn’t matter if we all die,” Smith sings at the beginning of “Century” The paranoid phenomenon that opens the decade of 1982. Pornography. The nihilism of the line is emblematic of The Cure’s early albums, which often confront the specter of death with absurdism and existential angst. Smith couldn’t have known then that, 42 years later, he would release the reverse song, “And Nothing Is Forever,” a heartfelt ballad about a promise he made to be by a loved one’s side when they died. Over swelling strings and a delicate piano motif, Smith sings of his world aging and holding someone one last time in “the dying of the light.” That last part, of course, is from Dylan Thomas’ book. “Don’t go gently into that good night.” about resisting death even when you are at its threshold. Despite the gratitude, Smith seems more at peace. “It doesn’t really matter,” he sings, echoing “One Hundred Years” before turning it around: “if you say we’ll be together.”

Okay, I admit this reference is somewhat subliminal, but Smith really wants you to know that he hates drones, and what could be more Bradburyian than that? “Drone:Nodrone” is the most aggressive song on the album, cutting through all the rumination on death with heavy guitars as Smith says, “I’m breaking again / I feel it in the air.” In the album’s press materials, Smith explains that the song was inspired by an experience he had behind his house when a camera drone flew by. “It disturbed me,” he writes. “It was a horrible reminder of the intrusive and surveilled nature of the ‘modern world’.” Smith has shared his admiration for the Fahrenheit 451 author several times, and once explained Spin why she turned down the opportunity to have lunch with him: “He gave me a signed copy of Something evil is coming this waybut he didn’t want to come to the concert. He said it wasn’t his thing. I thought, Well, if he’s going to be such a serious old bastard anyway, then lunch isn’t my thing.“

Just after “Drone:Nodrone,” Smith invokes Bradbury more explicitly in “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” a song about the unexpected death of his brother. Over funeral keys, Smith sings about “closer shadows” and “dreamless sleep” before directly mentioning his brother: “Something evil is coming this way / to steal my brother’s life.” The first part is spoken by one of the three witches in Shakespeare’s play. macbeth and Bradbury later reused it as the title of his 1962 fantasy novel, Something evil is coming this way. The vagueness of the line: what exactly is coming? – serves the song’s overall framing of death as incomprehensible.

In interviews about Songs of a new worldSmith has indicated that there could be at least two more Cure albums, thanks to the amount of material the band accumulated during the long gap between their last two releases. Given how long he joked Songs of a lost world because that is a “fool me once” situation. But if this ends up being the band’s last album, one could hardly ask for a better culmination than their latest song, “Endsong,” another Disintegration-Esque, ten-minute slow recording in which Smith doesn’t start singing until after six minutes. When he does, it’s to describe an experience he had looking at the moon the summer he turned 60, thinking about how it’s somehow the same moon he looked at during the Apollo 11 moon landing as a child, even though the The world is not the same and neither is he. Accepting mortality is one thing, but throughout the album, Smith can’t seem to square the many versions of himself he’s been over the years with the person he is now. Invoking Dowson again, all he knows is that at “the end of every song” he will be left “alone with nothing.”