Robert Smith also celebrate upcoming 45th anniversary of Seventeen Seconds and deliver the hits during three-hour, release-night London gig
The Cure celebrated the arrival of their long-awaited and much-acclaimed new album Songs of a Lost World on Friday with a release-night, livestreamed London concert.
The three-hour concert, coming on the heels of a BBC gig two nights before, featured Robert Smith and company performing the new LP in order and in its entirety, including the live debut of album tracks “War Song,” “Drone:Nodrone,” and “All I Ever Wanted.”
The rest of the setlist included hits and fan favorites from the band’s extensive catalog, as well as a section dedicated to the upcoming 45th anniversary of the Cure’s 1980 LP Seventeen Seconds, where they unearthed the track “Secrets” live for the first time since 2011.
The 31-song concert concluded with an encore that boasted “Friday I’m in Love,” “Close to Me,” and a show-ending “Boys Don’t Cry.”
“The words ‘long awaited’ don’t begin to do justice to the new Cure album. Songs of a Lost World is an album that’s been promised, rumored, dangled, teased, longed for, despaired of, imagined,” Rob Sheffield wrote in his review of the album.
“Songs of a Lost World is the triumphant power-doom epic it needed to be, fully the Cure’s best since Disintegration, as Smith reaches into the depths of his cobwebbed heart, going deep into adult loss and grief.”
The same day as the album’s arrival, Smith talked about his stance against predatory ticketing practices that the Cure employed on the band’s North American tour.