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Watch The Cure debut new track, ‘I Could Never Say Goodbye’

Fri 21 October 2022 9:55, UK

The Cure have debuted another new track from their long-awaited new album Songs Of A Lost World, giving ‘I Could Never Say Goodbye’ its first breath at a show in Kraków last night.

The post-punk legends have set off on their bumper European stadium tour with their touring partners, The Twilight Sad, having kicked off the run of shows in Latvia at the start of this month.

So far, The Cure have treated fans in Europe to two new songs, ‘Alone’ and ‘Endsong ‘, as well as welcoming guitarist and keyboardist Perry Bamonte back to the band.

“It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum,” frontman Robert Smith said of the imminent album in a conversation with NME. “I lost my mother and my father and my brother recently, and obviously, it had an effect on me,” he said back in 2019. “It’s not relentlessly doom and gloom. It has soundscapes on it, like Disintegration, I suppose. I was trying to create a big palette, a big wash of sound.”

Back in May, Smith revealed that the album was almost complete, hoping that new material would be out by the tour’s start in October. “Essentially, it’s a 12-track album,” he told NME. “It’s there, it’s kind of half-mixed and half-finished. It’s a weird thing. It’s kind of evolved over the last two years. It hasn’t always been a good thing to have been left alone with it. You pick at it, like picking at seams, and everything falls apart.”

“It’ll be worth the wait,” he continued. “I think it’s the best thing we’ve done, but then I would say that. I’m not doing an Oasis when I say that, ‘IT’S THE BEST FOOKIN’ ALBUM’. A lot of the songs are difficult to sing, and that’s why it’s taken me a while.”

Discussing the mood of the long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s 4:13 Dream, Smith said that the album “doesn’t have very much light on it” and that it sounds “more like Disintegration than Head On The Door.”

“It’s pretty relentless, which will appeal to the hardcore of our audience, but I don’t think we’ll be getting any Number One singles off it or anything like that!” he laughed. “It’s been quite harrowing like it has for everyone else.

“I’ve been more privileged than most, but lockdown and Covid has affected me in as much as I’ve lost an entire generation of aunts and uncles in under a year. It’s things like that which have informed the way I’ve been with the record.”

Smith added: “Essentially, we recorded two albums in 2019. I’ve been trying to finish two at the same time, which is pretty much impossible. One is nearly ready to go.”

Listen to ‘I Could Never Say Goodbye’ below.