In hindsight, finally receiving the first new Cure album in 16 years in which Robert Smith now-infamously introduces it by proclaiming the end of everything song that we sing did in fact — through some cosmic tear — unleash a certain energy into the universe that would definitively lead us there. Without going full-on myopic in political doomsdaying, let’s just say that the return of the English alternative torchbearers was made for these times.

In reading founding and former member Lol Tolhurst’s scene document, Goth, one thing is for certain: goth music is about holding love and death in equal balance within the same song, and Songs of a Lost World epitomizes that in spirit and tone. It’s also an alter offering of a reminder as why you should never write off the scene’s pioneers, even if it’s been 30+ years since their last widely acclaimed release and their post-millennium output since has screamed “legacy act” — glory days as distant and forlorn as the dread-filled hallows of Smith’s voice himself.

Songs of a Lost World is no Pornography nor is it Disintegration, but that’s not what I as a modernist listener wants of the band in 2024, and no one should expect either. The album is the sound of these purveyors of the dark taking the generational temperature in modifying their gothic arena-sized ambitions with a production vibe of grandeur, meeting whatever’s left of today’s decaying alternative climate with heavy intentionality in the way they’ve created epic pop dirges ringing out larger than life through crater-stamping riffs laid over moon-swooning synths, giving Smith carte blanch to paint the stars melancholic of whatever cliché wicked this way may come (his voice being vampirically ageless is a luster to it all, too.)

Some may only want to view their 16th studio album through the lens of only their past. I see it more so through the present resurgence of their morbid lineage of Deftones, My Chemical Romance, and AFI with a new generation where dark matter doesn’t necessarily dim the more time passes. It instead goes through a temporal period of creative dormancy before returning and swallowing the world whole all over again.

Highlights: “Alone”, “Drone:Nodrone”, “I Can Never Say Goodbye”

The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World is available now on Fiction Records.