★★★★★
On one level, The Cure’s first studio album since 2008 is strangely unshowy: there are only eight songs, so it’s finished in less than 50 minutes. What those eight songs say, however, is as important as anything as Robert Smith has ever sung.
Not since David Bowie’s Blackstar has an album been so expressive about mortality. If Blackstar was about Bowie’s own death, The Cure have created a mortality record whose beauty lies in perfectly expressing the need to savour love while we can.
That’s hardly a unique sentiment, but the bold, bleak expression of Smith mourning his elder brother Richard in I Can Never Say Goodbye is devastating: the singer of Pornography seeing exactly what lies at the end of the telescope decades later and wanting none of it.
Even more heartbreaking, And Nothing Is Forever will instantly become the favourite song for couples who have grown old with The Cure. Smith has played keyboards for years, but he’s matured as a pianist since the days of 4:13 Dream, his wonderfully graceful performance underscoring a relatively simple lament where he pleads: “Promise you’ll be with me in the end.”