The Cure -- Songs Of A Lost World

aka the new album that's been in the works forever. A two track vinyl live release of two songs from it or at least the sessions is due for RSD this year but more importantly, the band's social media just started updating to this:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kqdyhnklmmv34nmml6btyqv6/bafkreifbbsc3hwgk7xgverfik65bt57fol3akselqd3co4w2yzwq6qndwy@jpeg

So...something's up.

new album! at some point in the next 3-5 years!

Apparently the source code contains "The Cure- Blackout"

Lead single maybe?

I just got this framed

https://static.musictoday.com/store/bands/5341/product_600/2ndaustin514819.jpg

Last time the Cure released an album it came a month after a lengthy period of growing Cure hyperfixation came unstuck when receiving Three Imaginary Boys for my 11th birthday and happening to have my head fairly close to the speaker at 1:46 into Subway Song. My then-easily shook self didn't feel like listening to them again until shortly after 4:13 Dream had passed ahem.

I knew a guy who used to carry around a briefcase full of Cure cassette tapes, official and bootlegs, wherever he went.

can't wait!

man i wanted this for so long. i've become so depressed and disillusioned with everything that i just assumed it would never happen. and i want it to be like 'the cure family' ― every still living past member needs to contribute. especially pearl. and lol. and boris. i want jeanette fucking landry on handclaps goddammit. omg, this fucking band.

Yes I popped that image into an editor, cranked up the contrast and revealed a lovely blurry crunchy textured photo of something. Ancient lace maybe?

curefans.com has a contest, you can win a vinyl copy of the album if you guess the correct release date

http://curefans.com/index.php?topic=9835.0

my guess: 2037-02-29

Tomorrow. It's tomorrow. I already have a copy. You wish you were me. (I'll repeat this every day and one day I will be right.)

So excited

god imagine if there was a new Cure album that didn't have totally risible artwork

(also I really like the songs played live I've heard so far)

Signed up for the mailing list.

I half expected a "we're excited to announce our new logo" mail.

Robert took heightened control over artwork in '97 and it's almost exclusively sucked ever since.

Design agencies named after CBBC arts and crafts shows were not the way to go.

You mean it hasn't been Andy Vella this whole time? I thought that was the whole idea!

I weep for the days of Parched Art, Cure used to have consistently awesome cover art!

Vella came back for 4:13 Dream. That and Greatest Hits are the post-Galore artworks I like best. For a while the Cure used smART, which afaik is Robert himself directing Stylorouge - Five Swings Live, Bloodflowers, Trilogy, the self-titled album. All hideous and/or shockingly shoddy for a major label band.

I like the s/t art tbh, I think it’s very sweet

I enjoy the album title being listed separately, a la Portishead.

the new songs were honestly my favorite part of the show I saw last year

Currently a slew of rumors flying all day that a supposed release date and physical art for the album is floating around. We'll see.

Looks like November 1 date

hopefully that's the album and not just a single drop

finally!!!!

did it say what year?

god imagine if there was a new Cure album that didn't have totally risible artwork

(also I really like the songs played live I've heard so far)

― Cognosc in Tyrol (emsworth)

Let’s be honest not even classic The Cure had good artwork. Most of it is looks lazy or is not very aesthetically pleasing… imho their best artwork is usually for compilations and I’ll assume the band were not too involved in the art direction of those. Their best album covers imho are:

- Join the Dots
- Mixed Up / Torn Down
- Japanese Whispers
- Standing on a beach / staring at the sea

Wellllll I would go into bat for 17S, Faith, The Top, HotD, KM3 and Disintegration as all being visually distinctive and aesthetically pleasing! As well as vibing with the contents..

Plus a lot of the single sleeves are cool too

They certainly are miles above eg Bloodflowers / The Cure . 4:13

I remember seeing Bloodflowers in a shop and being absolutely shocked, thinking it must have been some kind of mistake or a mocked-up promo sleeve made by the work experience kid at the HMV store

three imaginary boys has a great cover. fridge

Moka you're insane, the Cure have some of the best singles cover art of any band, ever

given the timeframes they've been working with i assume 1 november is when they'll announce the album properly, not the release date

Wellllll I would go into bat for 17S, Faith, The Top, HotD, KM3 and Disintegration as all being visually distinctive and aesthetically pleasing! As well as vibing with the contents..

absolutely, these are great album covers. Disintegration is particularly amazing. The difference between it and alleged-sequel-album Bloodflowers is astounding.

Moka coming with serious challops. I still have my longbox, lol, faith cover mounted to a piece of black paper somewhere, total classic cover

three imaginary boys has a great cover. fridge

Undy’s artwork for the WMS LP / singles / adverts feels like a reclamation of the hated-by-RS Imaginary sleeve. Household objects and heightened, unheimlich lighting.

Chill chill lol I don’t think it’s bad by any means, some of it I do think is decent (Faith and Seventeen Seconds in particular are cool) and very tied to the music within… also yeah I wasn’t considering singles artwork, there’s some brilliant stuff in there I agree.

I don’t think their artwork is anywhere as iconic as their music though

*ducks*

Seventeen Seconds used to be my favourite album cover ever. I ripped it off twice for my first "band" at school.

I can't and won't fault their 79-96 artwork at all. Apart from Concert (which I guess goes for the bootleg look but that's not a good look). Even the lurid toytown of the WMS era I enjoy a lot.

https://i.discogs.com/uVdoAfCAxpxxeNnvoRXBixGCUWG5TUFF00mbVrSO8TI/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:599/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTQyNDkz/NS0xNDc3NzA2MDYy/LTk1MTEuanBlZw.jpeg

i hate to be the heavy winded puffed up overbearing guy once again, but that's some fairly iconic artwork you got there, friends.

Hope that's not a joke. That's such a nice piece of cod-Garrett design.

You know what is terrible? This art for the Australian 7" of A Forest. But if you own a copy (I have a moderately beat up one) the aesthetic distress is neatly offset by the Discogs median price.

https://postimg.cc/4H3pLRt7

Ah dammit. Anyway.

Even the angle of the song name adds to the overall air of car air freshener.

Cure album covers poll?

xp lol yes and then the bold design choice to use yet another random and inappropriate font for Another Journey By Train

I do love these early Cure artefacts though - esp the Australian ones, they did some pretty brutal small venue touring here in the early days - and these slightly off-brand releases kind of speak to a time before they became a properly global concern

another favourite!

Happily Ever After with the flag wavers is another bizarre favourite - which I first saw in Michael Ochs' 1000 Record Covers book years before I knew what it was, wondering why it wasn't part of the sleeve collages in the Wish and Greatest Hits booklets.

Kinda looks haflway between SMart the TV show for real, and Hipgnosis (the latter fitting as the comp is the Cure's own A Nice Pair with its similar unrelated imagery).

Btw the Bloodflowers sleeve is a Picasso compared to the booklet, which seems to have been designed on Microsoft Word with Times New Roman like Robert lost a bet, or like someone having made a CD-R of an internet-only release and wanting to make it seem more legit. Actually it's almost a (less interesting) dead ringer for that anti-design style that followed/still follows in the wake of The Life of Pablo.

Poll idea sounds fun

absolutely not joking re: jset cover art. to me, it belongs in the record cover hof, alongside other striking surreal imagery like pink moon, roger dean stuff, bitches brew, funcrusher plus, etc. hyper realistic infinite cartoony scenes instantly burned into my memory. trippy, but functional. very classic.

84-86 singles are probably what I’d consider the apex of their visual identity

That 'Jumping Someone Else's Train' cover I would say is more of a Linder Sterling style lift

I don't like the sound of his kit or the lack of creativity in his parts (Chad Smith). I can't tell if I dislike him more than Reeves, though.

I saw the Cure with Boris in the same way that I saw Depeche with Alan Wilder

This is a good point, but it's funny you picked DM, since they reacted to Wilder leaving by apparently permanently hiring their own distracting drummer. One difference is that I eventually got used to that guy. Cooper, it's amazing to me that he's been in the band for basically 30 years (!) and last year live was the first time he sounded right to me. And then this album set me back again. Just like the clocks.

"is explicitly about being unable to return to earlier states of being"

they returned to those states pretty good on this album!

Roffle

i might be enjoying this thread more than the album, but it's close

― maf you one two (maffew12), Sunday, November 3, 2024 1:03 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I must admit that I'm enjoying the good will being shown to Smith and the collective joy/interest in the Cure (including this thread). I'm not massively into the album itself, so far (though really like "Alone") though hopefully that will change when I've lived with it a bit more.

I feel bad for the Troxy sound guy: "I BEG you not to play the thunder!"

And I wish they would stop using the breaking glass sounds in 'Disintegration'.

Otherwise, wow, what a great show.

Subsequent listening has warmed me up to several of the songs but not done anything to sell me on the production. Boosting the bass and reducing the treble helps a bit but can only do so much with drums that sound like trash cans. I don't mind the muddiness so much as the harshness.

BUT I think it's a good Cure album, and I agree that Smith's vocals sound great.

Feel like perhaps my harping on negatives has obscured the fact that I fell in love with this band aged 15 with The Head on the Door and for the next five years they were the single most important thing in my life, without exaggeration. I will always deeply love them and want good things from/for them. The new record is thrillingly great after decades where it seemed like Smith had forgotten his muse or gone adrift (and I think he feels the same way). I cued up the album wanting to love every second of it. I’m angry at the mix and at Cooper for breaking the spell and making me wince at times, while everything else is a triumph, their best and most moving record since I thought they’d lost it.

Amen

This is better than I expected. Drone:Nodrone is the best thing on it imo

The mini Seventeen Seconds set from the BBC Troy show is great, there’s still life in those old chestnuts!

*Troxy, jeez autocorrect

I got halfway through it, and so far, I really like this. I'm not a Cure die-hard (or even a fan, really, I like their singles and Faith and The Head On The Door). Disintegration never received much love from me, the "aural muck" quality of the production (outside of the singles) just made it too much of a slog...

...and yet here we are, with this new one, which so far sounds like every song is produced like "Plainsong", but it's even denser and even more monolithic and it actually totally works?

"A Fragile Thing" has this addictive bassline and Robert's guitar playing is as unspeakably beautiful as ever

Reeves Gabrels unexpectedly the least-MVP so far, only because his gnarliness makes me appreciate Robert's lyrical style that much more

And Robert Smith deserves an award for "best preserved baritone", I think. I skipped through Disintegration after finishing "Warsong" for a reference and... he sings exactly as gorgeously now as he did 35 years ago.

I honestly think the only person who might have beat the clock (if you will) more than RS vocally over time is Russell Mael. It’s just nuts.

Well, Colin Blunstone would like a word, but yes I agree

imagine if his voice broke one day and RS started singing like Barry White

"Can't Get Enough Of Your Walk, Babe"

"Can't Get Enough Of Your Love, Cat"

“Never Enough of Your Love, Babe”

(oh no, what have I done?)

"Come Close To Me, Babe"

"Why Can't I Be Your Love, Babe"

"Baby, Baby (Let's Go To Bed)" (ASCAP)

Those harsh upper frequencies get less harsh on repeated listens. It's like slowly getting used to a bad smell in the room to the point where you don't notice it anymore.

God bless whoever said this tho:

i love you all but lol you guys never change. these incessant posts about “the mix” … it’s like being presented with a new painting & talking about the bloody frame

I'm one of those people who stopped listening after Wish, but if this was the 1996 follow-up, it would probably have represented a slight return to form.

It doesn't sound, to me, like "harsh upper frequencies", it sounds as if the instrumental elements have been deliberately summed in ways that make the squashed together, so that on a track like "And Nothing Is Forever" it is impossible for my ears to distinguish the rompler strings from the rompler piano, it's just a munged-up pastel collage of changing harmonies. And that's cool.

Ivy. cited Jesu and that's otm. I hear "Plainsong", which has always been the troll guarding the gate insofar as "enjoying Disintegration" is concerned, a too-long disorienting mess of too-many overdubs. But on this album, the same it's odd, it's better constructed sonically and seems to be the entire thesis, and I like it

to be fair, the mix is less the frame and more some weird rainbow oil slick pigment added to the paint that some people can't see, some people can't unsee, and is also the aural equivalent of the Matisse font

That is beautiful.

Calling the overall production "the mix" is weird to me, lots of decisions were made in the process of making this album, it's not that mix day came around and the mixer just muddified it. It's muddy by design

I'll wait for the Robert Smith interview saying exactly this ^^^. In the meantime I blame bad decision making.

Having said this, though, I *have* listened to it a few times at low volume and it's an easier ride.

I think some songs suffer more than others. And Nothing… + I Can never say goodbye in particular sound crowded and flat. The guitar parts are drowned out.
Anyway, I find those two songs are a bit too similar. Drone sounds like a crappy late 90’s bside but I’ve seen people stanning for it so maybe it’ll grow on me.
The rest is fantastic

A downmix of the Bluray has just appeared in various questionable places online. Dynamic range of 10 (the regular version is 6)

Just did a Youtube rip of the Troxy show, will see how the album set sounds on headphones

Downmix sounds like a normal album... fantastic

I was noticing like "wow there's a lot of chime tree on this album" and then "oh another chime tree, Robert must really like that sound" and then the last thing you hear on "A Fragile Thing" is a reversed chime tree and I thought "maybe Robert owns stock in the chime tree company or something"

Must hunt that downmix!!

I'll make one for myself this weekend, just need to get my order!

i love you all but lol you guys never change. these incessant posts about “the mix” … it’s like being presented with a new painting & talking about the bloody frame

otm

Is there a good reason that this album has been released with a Dolby Atmos version? (I presume it's as simple as Smith likes the format??)

I could be wrong but I think the only other album I have in this format is one of the early Johann Johannsson ones.

it's time for you to get into Jethro Tull

Is there a good reason that this album has been released with a Dolby Atmos version? (I presume it's as simple as Smith likes the format??)

A number of the rich old white men who run The Music Industry are convinced that Dolby Atmos is the future, because they and their old white rich friends all love it, so they're sinking money into creating AI-enhanced Atmos "surround mixes" of albums that were originally recorded in four-track mono. It's completely absurd.

It doesn't sound, to me, like "harsh upper frequencies", it sounds as if the instrumental elements have been deliberately summed in ways that make the squashed together, so that on a track like "And Nothing Is Forever" it is impossible for my ears to distinguish the rompler strings from the rompler piano, it's just a munged-up pastel collage of changing harmonies. And that's cool.

Ivy. cited Jesu and that's otm. I hear "Plainsong", which has always been the troll guarding the gate insofar as "enjoying Disintegration" is concerned, a too-long disorienting mess of too-many overdubs. But on this album, the same it's odd, it's better constructed sonically and seems to be the entire thesis, and I like it

the mix being so squashed together so that instruments are difficult to distinguish and the upper-mid frequencies being unusually boosted (giving it a harsh sound) are completely different issues, one is an eq problem, one is a problem with compression & the overall balance of instrumentation. i dislike both!

to me it just kinda ruins the point of having these long disintegration-style instrumental passages if most of the instruments are squashed and buried, i don't like the way it sounds at all. "plainsong" is a good comparison point (though obviously we have opposite opinions) but i'm confused by the idea that it has too many overdubs? there's barely anything to it, just drums, synth strings, bass (playing the solo) and vocals, but it can all be heard clearly and sounds gigantic. if it were mixed like this album then gallup's bass solo would have been buried under the synth strings instead of at the forefront which wouldn't have worked anywhere near as well to my ears

Well that’s nice — $5 digital edition of the album with five bonus tracks: live versions of album songs from last year’s Shoreline shows, one of which I attended:

https://shopus.songsofalost.world/products/songs-of-a-lost-world-deluxe-edition-digital-album

US buyers only.

had a proper reverent lights-off listen on headphones last night - which is a thing in itself, I didn't ever feel like doing this with bloodflowers / The Cure / 4:13 dream

it was enjoyable and emotional and good! the album goes for a vibe and is successful in achieving it and there are no skips for me. it is a good new Cure album!

but! even with my most forgiving ears on I was a bit taken aback at how hard it was to discern what was going on in the music - which was always a big thing listening to Disintegration, I would listen to it and adored the way the parts entered and left the soundstage, and interacted with each other - it is a Cure signature thing! clever interlocking parts.

and after listening to the live shows over the weekend, it is particularly a drag how Robert's guitar parts are just indistinct mush - he is a lovely emotive player still and they are lovely parts but they are just super hard to pick out of the mix, I am only really aware of them because of listening to the live versions

is this paying too much attention to the frame? maybe. but these songs are constructed to do a particular thing - as above, I think it is a genius Cure thing that the songs are constructed to have an effect in a way that makes them pretty bulletproof to perform live (and hence why there is fan discomfort at stuff like the keyboard-free tour of c.2008)

and the art of recording music is partly the art of imparting information to a listener - and I do feel there is important information here that is not conveyed as clearly as it could be

I really don’t feel like I’m missing anything in the mix when I’m listening to this. Different pieces still jump out at me when I listen to this depending on what catches my attention but I mostly process each song as a whole; the “muddy” mix encourages that type of holistic consumption IMO

Listening to those new official Shoreline live cuts now -- having had a bootleg of the show I was at, nice to hear these songs in particular in a clean official version, though based on this thread I fear to recommend them further as a number of you will listen and then say your ears are being dunked in suet, or that a tiny microtone at one point is equivalent to mass murder, or that them not being available in AIFF-level quality surround sound is grounds for planetary exile.

As one of those boring people for whom DISINTEGRATION is the peak for these guys that they never quite hit again, this album is just lovely.

Hey - it’s ok to care about sound, just as it’s ok to care about musical quality. If it doesn’t bother you, lucky you, don’t imply that I’m less of a fan because I like things to sound good when it aligns with the artistic intent.

I mean we all agree that 4:!3 dream sounds terrible right? it's just that the songs / ~~vibe~~ are also not as good

Yeah I mean I'm NOT an audiophile. I listen to stuff in crappy formats through the car stereo and it doesn't bother me. There are specific records where I think the production does the music a disservice — been a lot of talk about this on the Tom Petty thread, e.g., and of course we had the much-discussed Replacements remix. This feels like one of those records to me, and obviously that reaction is neither unique nor universal. My own thinking is that Smith's ears might be going — in the way Tommy Erdelyi's damaged hearing seems to have been the genesis of the original Tim mix. But I'm in no position to know!

I mean we all agree that 4:!3 dream sounds terrible right? it's just that the songs / ~~vibe~~ are also not as good

yeah, though it doesn't have the harsh frequencies issue & while the mix is still very compressed & muddy it doesn't hurt things quite as much because there just isn't as much going on in those songs