Robert Smith, never one to shy away from melancholic musings or teasing future plans, has revealed that a second Cure album is nearly complete and, remarkably, a third is already waiting in the wings. With the band poised to release Songs of a Lost World on 1 November (All Souls’ Day)—marking their first offering since 2008’s 4:13 Dream—it seems The Cure is once again diving headfirst into the abyss.
“I felt that we should be summing up,” said Smith. “I thought, ‘The 40th anniversary of the band happens in 2018, and the 40th anniversary of the first album was is 2019, so we’ll do something that sums up what the band is and where we got to. It was a grand plan – and grand plans generally don’t work very well, in my experience…It wasn’t really being done for the right reasons. It was a bit ‘triumphal’, I suppose, looking back. The tone of it was wrong. As it turned out, what happened in 2018 was a great way to mark the anniversary of the band. It allowed me the time to think, ‘Why would we make a new album?’
“What happened in 2019 was much more natural, and everything evolved out of that,” he continues. “There was no longer this idea that we were ‘celebrating’ something or marking something – it was becoming something much more artistic to honest, rather than something that was part of this whole idea of, ‘Here’s The Cure after 40 years – be amazed!’”
Fans have noticed that several tracks performed during the Shows of a Lost World tour are absent from the forthcoming album. Smith reassures that the band is still on course for two more albums, with the next one “virtually finished.” Yet, he’s learned to tread carefully, reflecting on his premature album promises in 2019.
Looking ahead, The Cure will hit the road again in the fall of 2025, embarking on a tour that will keep them busy through 2028, culminating with their 50th anniversary. The ever-looming Cure documentary, directed by longtime collaborator Tim Pope, also inches closer to completion.
When discussing the band’s upcoming world tour, the frontman revealed that the aim is to finish another new album that is “virtually finished” before embarking on the road again in 2025.
“We’ll start up again next year,” said Smith. “Seriously, I have to finish the second album. We were going to play festivals next year, but then I decided that we weren’t going to play anything next summer. The next time we go out on stage will be autumn next year.
“But then we’ll probably be playing quite regularly through until the next anniversary – the 2028 anniversary! It’s looming on the horizon. The 2018 one, I started to think about in late 2016, thinking, ‘I’ve got a year and a half, it’s easy!’ And yet I still didn’t manage to get there in time. Now, I’m starting to think, ‘2028, I must get things in order’; so [that’s] the documentary film and things like that.”
In the interview, Smith continues: “I’m 70 in 2029, and that’s the 50th anniversary of the first Cure album. That’s it, that really is it. If I make it that far, that’s it. In the intervening time, I’d like us to include playing concerts as part of the overall plan of what we’re going to do. I’ve loved it; the last 10 years of playing shows have been the best 10 years of being in the band. It pisses all over the other 30 years! It’s been great.
“Not having a new album for all that period of time, we’ve played 130 or 150 different songs because we’ve turned into a live band that draws on the catalogue. We can go out and play shows, and we can play two hours of 30 songs and completely different songs each night. There’s a freedom to that.”
During the interview, Smith also elaborated on the band’s stance on concert ticket pricing.
‘If people save on the tickets, they buy beer or merch,” says Smith. “There is goodwill, they will come back next time. It is a self-fulfilling good vibe and I don’t understand why more people don’t do it. It was easy to set ticket prices, but you need to be pig-headed. We didn’t allow dynamic pricing because it’s a scam that would disappear if every artist said, ‘I don’t want that!’ But most artists hide behind management. “Oh, we didn’t know,” they say. They all know. If they say they do not, they’re either fucking stupid or lying. It’s just driven by greed.”
Songs Of A Lost World is out on November 1st. In the meantime, Listen to A Fragile Thing below.
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