The Cure land first Number One album in 32 years with ‘Songs Of A Lost World’: “It is genuinely heartwarming”

The Cure have scored their first Number One UK album in 32 years with ‘Songs Of A Lost World‘.

• READ MORE: The Cure: every album ranked in order of greatness

Robert Smith and co’s first full-length record in 16 years – the follow-up to 2008’s ‘4:13 Dream’ – arrived last Friday (November 1) during a week which saw them play two shows at the iconic BBC Radio Theatre before performing their new record in full at London Troxy’s venue the same day their album was released.

It outsold the rest of the Top Five combined to reach the summit, which included Sabrina Carpenter‘s ‘Short N’ Sweet’, Tyler, The Creator‘s ‘CHROMAKOPIA’, Charli XCX‘s ‘Brat’ and Ed Sheeran‘s ‘Mathematics (Tour Collection)’.

The album also topped the official UK vinyl album charts, surpassing more than 40,000 physical album sales by the midweek alone.

Reacting to the news, Smith the Official Charts Company: “It is enormously uplifting, genuinely heartwarming to experience such a wonderful reaction to the release of the new Cure album.

“To everyone who has bought it, listened to it, loved it, believed in us over the years – THANK YOU!”

Reviewing ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ in a five-star review, NME wrote: “‘Songs Of A Lost World’ feels sufficient enough for the wait we’ve endured, just for being arguably the most personal album of Smith’s career.

“Mortality may loom, but there’s colour in the black and flowers on the grave.”

In a lengthy interview with Matt Everitt, which saw Smith reveal that The Cure have another new album that’s “virtually finished” – with a third new record also on the way, Smith shared that The Cure plan to tour 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.”

Back in 2019, the frontman said the new LP had been shaped by his “experience of life’s darker side” following the deaths of his mother, father and brother.

He recently opened up about the writing of his brother’s death in their track ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye‘.

Smith said: “I wrote this song a lot of different ways, until I hit on a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died,” he said. “It went all around the houses and I went everywhere with this song to sum up how I felt. In the end, it turned into a reasonably bleak little vignette.

“I wrote the song about it, and the music itself was what I wanted to breathe. I didn’t want the words to dominate the song, in a way that the music can become a backdrop to what you’re singing. In this, I think the music is more important than what I’m singing in a way. It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”

Elsewhere, he recently revealed that his wife Mary Poole Smith helped him finalise the tracklisting for ‘Songs Of A Lost World’.