The Cure's 2024 release is exceptional.

UCR ranked it as the best Rock record of the year.

The Cure's 14th album, their first in 16 years, finds Robert Smith confronting mortality and loss through a lens of experience and hope through despair. Songs of a Lost World doesn't alter the playbook - songs slow-build toward euphoric release, musical landscapes are delicately and deliberately excavated - but the Cure hasn't sounded this authoritative in more than 30 years. This is both a progression and a milestone, a career highlight that, if Smith's claims he's nearing the end of the Cure turn out to be true, Songs of a Lost World is a monumental record to go out on.

No drones and open thread away.