Music review The Cure are back - and worth the wait

The latter-day history of the Cure is a peculiar thing. They ended the 90s in apparent disarray, yet the 21st century found them more revered than ever. You couldn't move for younger artists paying homage: everyone from heavy metal bands to dance producers seemed to want to collaborate with the band's frontman, Robert Smith. It was a kind of renaissance, but the Cure seemed unable to fully capitalise on it. They always drew vast crowds, but an album to rank alongside their back catalogue's high points proved elusive, and you wondered how many people were at their gigs to hear stuff from their eponymous 2004 album or 2008's 4:13 Dream, both sprawling and uneven. Thereafter, gigs came flecked with new songs but the release schedule fell silent.

- Alexis Petridis

In a video accompanying the arrival of Songs of a Lost World, Smith's explanation of what happened in the intervening 16 years involves a complex mass of abandoned recording sessions, rash promises about release dates and close familial bereavements. In a way, these losses seem to have finally spurred Songs of a Lost World into existence.

They certainly fuel the album, anchoring and amplifying the kind of existential angst that has hung around the Cure's oeuvre from the start. Its songs variously find Smith mourning, staring down his own mortality and lost in reflection on a past that feels more appealing than the baleful and divisive atmosphere of the present day.