Sixteen years after their last album, five years after Robert Smith said “I feel intent on it being a 2019 release and would be extremely bitter if it isn’t,” and three years after long-time bassist Simon Gallup “appeared” to have quit the band because he “got fed up of betrayal,” The Cure is releasing Songs of a Lost World. And they seem to be having fun doing it.

They sent “cryptic postcards” to fans that didn’t quite announce the record. They put up a poster in the club where they played their first gig, followed by billboards and projections in cities around the world. They created an early 2000s-feeling promotional website where you can listen to short clips of two songs - if you can get in. They premiered the first song on the album on BBC Radio 6, and then launched a pre-order site, where you can order, among other things, a cassette of the new album. But the fun might end there. Robert Smith described it in 2022 as “relentless doom and gloom. It’s the doomiest thing that we’ve ever done.”

HT: Metafilter