Robert Smith has insinuated that the Cure’s upcoming album may be their last.

“The new Cure stuff is very emotional,” the iconic frontman revealed to The Sunday Times. “It’s ten years of life distilled into a couple of hours of intense stuff. I can’t think we’ll ever do anything else.”

The Cure’s last album, 4:13 Dream, came out in 2008. The band has released live albums and compilations since then, but a new studio LP still hasn’t come to fruition. Smith admitted that the long wait can be partly attributed to his own songwriting headaches.

“I’ve struggled more with finishing the words to these new Cure recordings than at any other point,” the singer confessed. “We recorded 20-odd songs and I wrote nothing. I mean, I wrote a lot, but at the end I looked at it and thought, ‘This is rubbish.’”

Smith went on to explain that he’s struggled to meet his own high lyrical standards. “The difficulty is I’ve become such a harsh critic of myself I think, ‘Who’s going to be interested in that?’ It is really that bad. I was listening, thinking this is the best music this band has made and my words are drivel.”

With a catalog of material as impressive and varied as the Cure’s, Smith has also struggled to avoid repeating himself. “How many things are there to write about? Seven stories or something?,” the singer pondered. “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 fucking “undulating”!’”

At one point, Smith was ready to abandon his efforts to complete another Cure album. “Last year I just gave up. I thought, ‘I can’t do it. They can all be instrumentals,’” the rocker admitted. “And this year I sort of came back to it. Last year was difficult for a number of reasons, not least the pandemic, but what I wrote this year I have enjoyed.”

 

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