The Cure have shared a new song, ‘A Fragile Thing’, and announced the tracklist for their upcoming album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’.
The goth legends shared a snippet of the track on Monday (October 7) and announced that the single would be arriving this week, after teasing it via their WhatsApp fan channel and mailing list the previous day.
‘A Fragile Thing’ is a lush, haunting track that comes in at just over four minutes, starting with ghostly piano before the bass and drums kick in – with Robert Smith’s vocals at the forefront of it all. The song may have been influenced by Smith losing his mother, father and brother, something which he said in 2019 was the source of some of the upcoming album’s “darkness”.
The single comes after the band released ‘Alone’, the album’s lead single, which became their first new material since their 2008 album ‘4:13 Dream’, in September.
“‘A Fragile Thing’ is driven by the difficulties we face in choosing between mutually exclusive needs and how we deal with the futile regret that can follow these choices,” said Smith, “however sure we are that the right choices have been made… it can often be very hard to be the person that you really need to be.”
‘A Fragile Thing’ was one of a number of new tracks The Cure previewed on their mammoth ‘Shows Of A Lost World’ tour across 2022 and 2023. It was one of the new songs showcased at their London show in December 2022 – NME saw the show, and wrote in a four-star review: “The ticking clock piano rhythms and rolling bass of ‘A Fragile Thing’ accompany the promise that there’s ‘nothing you can do to change the end’.”
‘Songs Of A Lost World’ is set to be released on November 1, and ‘A Fragile Thing’ is the third track on the album. Listen to the track here, and view the tracklist below – it includes ‘Endsong’, another song the band have been teasing over the last couple of weeks. You can pre-order the album here.
The ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ tracklist is:
‘Alone’
‘And Nothing Is Forever’
‘A Fragile Thing’
‘Warsong’
‘Drone:Nodrone’
‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’
‘All I Ever Am’
‘Endsong’
The album has been a long time in the making, with Smith saying in a clip posted to the band’s Instagram account last month: “I don’t think there was really a kind of an official beginning to this album because it’s been kind of drifting in and out of my life for like an awful long time. I mean if I have one regret is that I said anything at all about it in 2019 because I really shouldn’t have done that.”
He continued: “We had only just started creating it. I don’t know, there are various points where I thought ‘I think we are going to make a new album’ and then it’s kind of the idea, sort of like for various reasons, other things have happened and the idea’s been sort of pushed back. So I’m not sure but there have been definite points along the way where I thought ‘Ah, you know, this, you know, whether it be the first song.
“The key, I think, in the history of the band is if I know what the opening song is and I know what the closing song is, I think that’s the album halfway done, you know. That’s the key for an album.”
At the BandLab NME Awards 2022, he shared details about ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ and its sister album. He said: “So I’ve been working on two Cure albums, and one of them is finished,” he added. “Unfortunately, it’s the second one that’s finished. [On the other] I’ve got to do four vocals, and there are 10 songs on each album. We’re mixing next month on April 1, so I’ve got three weeks left.”
When asked about the sound of the upcoming records, Smith revealed: “Well the first Cure album is relentless doom and gloom. It’s the doomiest thing that we’ve ever done. The second one is upbeat.”
Meanwhile, The Cure will be playing two shows for the BBC at the end of the month, with fans able to enter a ballot, which closed earlier tonight (October 9), for access.
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