The one word Robert Smith will never sing: “Sounds terrible”
The Cure are one of the most influential, most spectacular bands of their era. Anyone who argues against that notion is either unaware of their impact or is ignoring it. Everyone from Blink-182 and The Killers to Deftones and Nine Inch Nails and everyone in between swears by the work of Robert Smith and his moody battalion, and for good reason. However, to be a fan of the band in the 21st century can be… frustrating.
To be clear, not because of the music they’ve released. Pretty much everything they’ve shared since the turn of the century has been at least decent. Then, in 2024, they casually dropped their best album in decades in the form of Songs of a Lost World. That, along with their utterly astonishing live show, has made countless generations of sad teenagers realise that they, too, have a place within The Cure’s deceptively warm embrace.
No, the reason that being a fan of The Cure can get a little testing is actually quite the opposite. It’s all the things that they have not done. You might think it unfair to judge a band by what they haven’t done, and you’d be right. However, Robert Smith has this vexing habit of letting his Ruby Woo-clad mouth run away with him and promising albums, singles, and tours that we fans will never, ever see.
We’re seeing it at this present time, in fact. When Songs of a Lost World was about to drop, Robert Smith kept talking about having a further two records in the can that could follow the new record up. Those two albums are ones we are still waiting for, and if his recent history is to be believed, we will be waiting a long, long time for them. What makes this doubly annoying is that for a good long while, The Cure were outright prolific with their records.
What changed to make The Cure less prolific?
Their 1980s pomp saw them release seven albums that decade, along with a handful of classic non-album singles like ‘The Lovecats’, ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ and ‘Let’s Go To Bed’. This prolific streak came to a screeching halt in the 1990s with a mere two over that decade. In fairness, life in The Cure was never peaches and cream, so it’s kind of a miracle we got that much music out of them at the time.
Smith has gone on record as saying that his 1980s were conducted in a haze of alcohol and drugs, and then the 1990s saw a more existential problem come over him. Well, that and a bunch of lawsuits coming from his old drummer. An interview with Smith conducted by The Times in 2021 is actually pretty revealing about this, showing a key reason why The Cure slowed down so dramatically after their heyday.
In the interview, he talks often about the difficulty he has specifically with writing lyrics to his songs. He says, “You write a certain number of songs and, honestly, you repeat yourself. How many things are there to write about? Seven stories or something? You try to find different words for something and it steps out of your normal use of language and sounds terrible. I want to sing as I speak, and my vocabulary is reasonably OK, so I thought, ‘I’ll put ‘undulating’ in a song.’ That is one I tried. Then I think, ‘You’re not singing f***ing ‘undulating’!”
In a way, this is quite a heartening response. It stands to reason that Smith could still half-arse records by The Cure if he really wanted to, but the man has, as he says earlier in the interview, “become such a harsh critic of [himself]”. No one likes the idea of Robert Smith beating himself up over his music, but many musicians who get to his level of fame and success are comfortable chucking out any old rubbish, content to let their diehards fund their next villa in the south of France.
Not our Bob. One can only hope that the rapturous response Songs of a Lost World got shows him just how much we appreciate the standards he holds himself up to.
