Robert Smith Talks “Very Emotional” New Cure Album
Robert Smith has opened up about the upcoming album by The Cure in a joint interview with Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry for The Times.
The two singers, who have collaborated on the new Chvrches single, How Not To Drown, discussed the ways their respective groups worked, with Robert Smith suggesting new Cure material hasn’t come easy: “I must admit. I’ve struggled more with finishing the words to these new Cure recordings than at any other point. 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.’ 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. Last year I just gave up. I thought, ‘I can’t do it. They can all be instrumentals.’ 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.”
Smith continued, “You write a certain number of songs and, honestly, you repeat yourself. How many things are there to write about? Seven stories or something? 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 f***ing “undulating”!’”
Smith also gave fans some indication of what to expect when the new material arrives: “The new Cure stuff is very emotional. It’s 10 years of life distilled into a couple of hours of intense stuff. I can’t think we’ll ever do anything else.”