Robert Smith of The Cure has given fans a bit of an insight into the group’s upcoming album, touching on the tragic “darkness” that has inspired its content.
Ever since the release of 4:13 Dream in 2008, fans have been eagerly hanging out for a new record from The Cure.
Currently in the middle of their longest gap between albums, the group’s frontman Robert Smith has given us a few updates in the past, including the fact that their “incredibly intense” and “fucking great” new record will be released on Halloween.
Now, in a new interview with The Los Angeles Times, Smith has revealed the band will be hitting the studio next month to wrap it all up, while also giving us an insight into the album’s working title.
“We’re going back in [the studio] three days after we get back from Pasadena for me to try and finish the vocals, which is, as ever, what’s holding up the album,” Smith explains. “I keep going back over and redoing them, which is silly. At some point, I have to say that’s it.”
“It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum,” he added of the record’s content. “I lost my mother and my father and my brother recently, and obviously it had an effect on me.
“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.”
Check out The Cure’s ‘Disintegration’:
“The working title was Live From the Moon, because I was enthralled by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing in the summer,” Robert Smith added. “We had a big moon hanging in the studio and lunar-related stuff lying around. I’ve always been a stargazer.”
While fans are undoubtedly eager to hear the new record, fears have constantly been raised that a new album could be the last we see of the iconic group, with keyboardist Roger O’Donnell seemingly confirming this notion earlier in the year.
“I said to Robert a couple of years ago, ‘We have to make one more record, and it has to be the saddest record that’s ever been made and the most dramatic’. And I think it will be,” O’Donnell explained.
“As far as I’m concerned, yeah, this is it. But I’ve gone into every album thinking this is it, and not glibly. I actually think this is it.”
When asked the same question in this LA Times interview, Robert Smith was far more positive about the future, noting it’s in his nature to keep things going.
“Being the contrarian that I am, I’d be very unhappy if it was the last one,” he explained. “We’ll be onstage tomorrow and I’ll be saying to them, ‘This is the last time in Paris,’ and they’ll look at me and shrug their shoulders. At some point, I will be proved right.”
Check out ‘Lullaby’ by The Cure:
