Today, after years of talking up multiple new albums in the pipeline, the Cure have finally released one of them. It’s really great, too. According to our review, Songs Of A Lost World, the first new Cure album in 16 years, is not a Disintegration-level masterpiece, but it’s way better than we’ve come to expect from a new LP by a classic band three decades past their peak.

To celebrate the new album’s release, the Cure are performing a release show at Troxy in London and livestreaming it to the world for free. The livestream is set to begin at 4 p.m. ET, and you can watch it all in the YouTube embed below.

On Wednesday, the Cure gave their first performance of 2024 in a BBC Radio 6 Music Session, in which they played Disintegration track “Last Dance” for the first time in five years and new album cut “All I Ever Am” for the first time ever. Later that night, the band played a longer set for the BBC Radio 2 In Concert series.

Robert Smith was interviewed in conjunction with both of those performances. Speaking to Radio 6, he explained that the gestation process for new albums has been slowed down by difficulty writing lyrics:

It’s the one thing, as I’ve grown older, that I’ve found much much harder to do, to write words that I want to sing. I can write words but I don’t really feel like singing them. So to arrive at that point where I think that it’s worth singing these songs, it has become really, really hard. I have to admit.

He had this to say about the Songs Of A Lost World album artwork:

The artwork in my head has become the album and it was an older person who gave me a copy of a book that was signed by an artist called Janez Pirnat who was a Slovenian sculptor…. I’d never really looked through it… and during Covid I was going through, I was trying to read everything that I had. I thought if I do one thing I’ve got to read War And Peace, I’ve got to read all these things. And I came to this book and I started looking through it and I saw the plate with this, Bagatelle it’s called, which was done in 1975, this sculpture of a head, all his sculptures are brilliant, they’re absolutely brilliant they all have this, around that time anyway, everyone who was sculpting they have this theme of its either something emerging out of rock or the rock is kind of eating it up kind of thing. They’re really really powerful and I’m not really an arty person, I don’t go to galleries and kind of go “Oooh look…” but something about it, I thought that’s it. That’s the album cover. I didn’t even know at the time what the album was called, I thought it was called Live From The Moon, and in my mind it was gonna just be a moonscape, you know? So I looked him up and he’d actually died on that day and I was very disturbed by it if I’m honest cause I don’t really buy into that kind of thing either. But I just thought this has to be the cover of the album so I got in touch with his widow eventually, left a respectful gap and I own it now, I’ve got it at home… Sitting in my room it’s a beautiful piece of sculpture but it’s, there is just something about it, it’s just such a plaintive thing and I think it’s also, it’s really clever because actually in real life it almost doesn’t exist, you can barely see it and it’s only when light shines on it in a certain way, it throws itself into relief and it’s like, it’s there, suddenly emerges and that’s what I really loved about it…

After expressing that he wouldn’t make it to his 70th birthay, Smith elaborated:

When I turned 60, I promised myself that I would stop thinking about anniversaries and upcoming stuff. It is kind of hard. The Cure anniversary […] I had my tongue in my cheek a bit when I was saying all that because I thought well, honestly I’d be really happy if I get to Christmas. The band’s gone through an awful lot in the last year and I’m making light of it but it becomes … you are inevitably encouraged within your own self just to think more about the day to day than you are about… so I’m looking forward to Christmas, I’m not really looking forward to my 70th birthday. If we get to my 70th birthday I’m quite happy for you to blow out the candles but, yeah I don’t think it’s tempting fate but I really just, I’m enjoying what we’re doing at the moment and I don’t really see any point in looking beyond it. For me personally, finishing a second Cure album, I’m almost there with it [….] once I’ve done that, then I shall take a deep breath and then I’ll look up, but until I finish it I’m not bothering about what comes next.

In the Radio 2 interview, Smith was asked whether it’s tough to perform emotionally charged songs:

Yeah a couple of them are… I don’t know hard… they drag me back into a mindset and emotional state which I don’t mind actually because it kind of reminds me how to feel […] The emotional songs still reconnect me with like… When we do it too much, I do find myself becoming a little bit maudlin. I realise sometimes that’s probably enough, we’ve been touring for long enough, I get very kind of self-obsessed with some stuff so […] everything becomes very raw again.

But on the upside is that I’m actually out there on stage being able to sing and so it really does help me, certainly in 2022 when we started doing these songs and I felt really… there’s nothing better than going out there… there’s nothing better than singing, if I’m honest. I mean it’s somehow better in front of people if I’m singing well, but just singing anywhere, I love singing. I sing to my sheep.

Speaking of those sheep:

I’ve got the only nocturnal sheep in Britain, seriously I’ve trained them to… I’m trying to train them because apparently you can’t train sheep but I’m determined. I’ve trained one of my sheep to shake hands, seriously! No honestly at night, I will probably post at some point before the end of the year […] another viral moment for me! I can’t get ‘em to talk but they do listen though, they’re very good listeners.

He had more to say about his nocturnal lifestyle:

I do live at night. I mean, my reason for being in a band was primarily so I didn’t have to get up for work, it really is. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to endure a boss and I didn’t ever think I’d be able to get anywhere on time in the morning… I couldn’t at school. It was like no, my mum’s voice just everyday ringing up the stairs “You’ve got five minutes till that bus!” One day I don’t have to do this. So it’s weird because the others all get up, they’re all daytime people and I honestly, I go to bed at like… I do listen to the Breakfast Show and I do watch the sun come out, and then I go to bed. I wasn’t joking, that’s actually how I live. […] it bothers me round about January, I start to get really miserable, oh if you think I’m miserable, God January! I don’t see daylight over the whole of January, so sometimes that gets to me… I don’t know, I just like being out at night.

Below, check out clips from the two BBC performances.