Please refer to my first piece of 2024 in this nudie rag—the January issue. I got two-thirds of the way to a new Portishead album, and as of today, The Cure’s perpetually delayed album Songs of a Lost World is finally here. My powers are infinite!
I've said it in previous issues, and I'll say it again: do not ask the universe kindly for anything—be grateful for nothing! Make demands! They will be met! Granted, it helps if you have a print outlet like I do, but I'm sure you, dear reader, can find some poor rag, desperate for content, that'll take whatever hogwash you can type out by the deadline. Hell, the editor just brought on a "movie critic" that I seriously doubt has even written so much as a high school paper on any film. The world is yours! Take it!
Jokes aside, when The Cure started teasing their long-awaited album in mid-September with a website update, some cryptic WhatsApp messages, and a poster at the first venue they ever performed at in Crawley, I was skeptical. Robert Smith had confirmed the album's existence back in 2019 and continuously promised that it would be "released soon" in interviews. Five years later, you can imagine I didn't take these little tidbits seriously due to Mr. Smith's track record for grossly miscalculating time. But lo, the first single, "Alone," dropped on September 26th in all its glory. Everyone who saw them on their most recent tour—including myself—is no stranger to these songs. Each main set for this most recent jaunt opened with "Alone" and closed with "Endsong.” As you now know, the recorded versions are in no way dissimilar to what you saw live (minus the absence of Parry Bamonte—I guess they just needed him for an extra guitar or keyboard part on stage). I won't waste words in this smut magazine talking about the songs and how inarguably awesome they all sound. My page is reserved for bad humor and worse takes, not gushing about one of my all-time favorite bands still delivering in their mid-sixties.
What I will waste boob space on is deciding, definitively, once and for all, what these songs can do for this (checks notes, can confirm) lost world. Well, let’s look at what the last Cure album did for us.
The last Cure album was released in October of 2008, right before the election, which sealed the ascension of Barack Obama. You can’t definitively say the two events aren’t related. Based on nothing other than how much I’m enjoying this record, I’m gonna say Smith and Co. will strike lightning twice and deliver the Presidency to Harris.
You could argue that the seeds for the subprime mortgage crisis were planted well before The Cure’s 4:13 Dream dropped, but I’m gonna ignore that argument. Instead, I’ll just connect the dots where there are none and point at the firm evidence that we, the public, were not faced with the world-changing reality of the 2008 recession until after that album dropped. So…while it seems like a bad thing 'cause of those words they used like "recession" and "crisis," really for poor losers like you and me, all this means is you’re about to see some real cheap houses on the market. Thank you, Robert!
I’m just gonna stick my fingers in my ears with cries of protest that Jon Favreau’s Iron Man came out in May of 2008, well before The Cure’s thirteenth studio album came out. My feelings don’t care about facts. This album plucked the cosmic string that set events in motion to give us 800 shitty Marvel movies. You can draw a line all the way back to when this record came out (if you fudge the date) and see that it must’ve been the fount from which these CGI shit piles sprayed. I guess the good news is that with this new album, a new Cinematic Universe will be birthed, which will probably also be terrible, but at least we'll finally be done with the Marvel one. Maybe with the release of The Cure’s fourteenth album, the book will finally close on that cursed era of cinema.
While it’s written in the very code that the first bitcoin was minted on January 3rd, 2009, the first public mention of the concept (Satoshi Nakamoto’s online paper explaining it) was on October 31, 2008—just four days after The Cure’s last album was released. I don’t believe in coincidences. The coming of this album will usher in the next major tech disrupter (that actually lasts). Regardless of how much value Bitcoin has lost, it still retains value (60K or so at the time of this publication). While other "disrupters" of our current tech bro dystopia, like the illegal (s)cab companies and the illegal hotel companies, are clearly circling the drain, the fake money for criminal company has persevered. It's even used as an official legal tender in El Salvador. What whacky, bulletproof tech scam will unfold in the wake of this landmark album? Whatever it is, I’m certain I’ll miss the boat on however you can make money off it.
