New Music From the Cure Is in the Wings
The Cure are reportedly sitting on "one to three" albums of new material.
The band hasn't released an album in more than a decade; their 13th LP, 4:13 Dream, arrived in 2008. But according to the group's guitarist, Reeves Gabrels, there are multiple albums worth of material on deck, much of which has been conceived throughout the pandemic.
"We were over-productive," Gabrels, who's previously played with David Bowie and joined the Cure in 2012, tells UCR. "Which is great, except it means you really can't judge the songs until you get them close to finished. You kind of have to bring all that material up to the point where you can hear what they are."
Though no official date has been set for the new music's release, Gabrels says the band is now "finishing up" the albums, which were started in 2019. The guitarist has been recording his parts remotely in upstate New York while the rest of the band records in England.
In 2021, frontman Robert Smith noted that the new material is "very emotional" and that completing the lyrics has been a challenge. “I’ve struggled more with finishing the words to these new Cure recordings than at any other point,” Smith said. “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 confessed that at one point he had considered scrapping the lyrics altogether and releasing just the music. "I thought, ‘I can’t do it. They can all be instrumentals,’” he said. “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.” The Cure are scheduled to resume touring in Europe later this year.