The Cure have announced the release of two brand new songs as live recordings that will be a double A-side for climate charity ‘Earth Percent’. Find details on how to get ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ and ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ below.
- READ MORE: On the cover – Robert Smith on 40 years of The Cure
Released via Naked Record Club – a record label that releases limited edition records on sustainable vinyl – ‘The Cure – Novembre: Live in France 2022’ is a double A-Side 12” Eco-Vinyl single featuring two live tracks that were recorded during the French leg of the band’s ‘Shows Of A Lost World’ tour.
The first song, ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ was recorded live in Montpellier at the Sud de France Arena on November 8 2022, while ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ was recorded live in Toulouse, Zénith, on November 13 2022. These are the first new tracks from The Cure in 16 years.
Records 1-100 will be signed by Robert Smith and will be available via The Cure’s website, while 101-5000 will be available exclusively from Naked Record Club Store here.
The Cure and Naked Record Club will be donating 100 per cent net profits from sales of this record to the climate charity Earth Percent, which was founded by Brian Eno.
Eno said of the release: “I’d like to thank The Cure and NAKED Record Club – both true innovators – for their generous support of vital climate projects through the release of ‘The Cure – Novembre: Live In France 2022.’ It’s a powerful example of how the music community can work together to build a better world.”
Naked Record Club co-founder, Simon Parker, added: “When I bought ‘The Head on the Door’ back in 1985, the teenage version of myself was shown a different way to live my life. My love of The Cure gave me the confidence to quit my dreary hometown in search of a band hellbent on indie-rock glories of their own, and one way or another I have worked in music ever since.
“So, when Robert Smith told me he wanted to work with NAKED Record Club on an eco-release for Earth Percent to raise climate change awareness in the music industry, I was astonished, excited and dumbstruck in equal measures.
“To make matters even more surreal, I was at the Montpellier show where one side of this exclusive 12” single was recorded. So that’s me clapping and shouting in the run out of ‘And Nothing Is Forever’!”
Previously, Parker said told Record Collector magazine that it would be his dream to work with The Cure on a release.
“We’d give away our body parts to release anything by The Cure. They have been my favourite band since 1985’s ‘The Head On The Door’. Rachel [Lowe – co-founder] and I saw them live in Montpellier last year and are convinced that Robert Smith has his own concerns about climate change. Maybe there’s still time to do an eco-press of their much delayed ‘Songs Of A Lost World,’” he added, referring to the title of The Cure’s next album.
Back in 2022, Smith revealed the album title of The Cure’s next album in an interview with NME.
The band have long teased the band’s much anticipated “merciless” new record and previously told us that two new albums were on the way back at the NME Awards back in 2020. Smith revealed in 2022 that one of them would arrive “very soon”.
“So I’ve been working on two Cure albums, and one of them is finished,” Smith told NME.“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.”
He continued: “I know what it’s called – it’s called ‘Songs Of A Lost World’. It’s got artwork, it’s got a running order, it’s almost done!” he said at the time.
Discussing the themes and character of the long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s ‘4:13 Dream‘, Smith said that the album “doesn’t have very much light on it” and that it sounds “more like ‘Disintegration’ than ‘Head On The Door’.”
“It’s pretty relentless, which will appeal to the hardcore of our audience, but I don’t think we’ll be getting any Number One singles off it or anything like that!” he told NME, explaining that it was informed by lockdown. “It’s been quite harrowing, like it has for everyone else.”
He continued: “I’ve been more privileged than most, but lockdown and COVID has affected me in as much as I’ve lost an entire generation of aunts and uncles in under a year. It’s things like that which have informed the way I’ve been with the record.
“…Essentially we recorded two albums in 2019. I’ve been trying to finish two at the same time, which is pretty much impossible. One is nearly ready to go.”
Smith also discussed how losing his mother, father and brother inspired the ‘darkness’ of The Cure‘s new album and his “experience of life’s darker side”.
“We’re going back in [the studio] three days after we get back from Pasadena for me to try and finish the vocals, which is, as ever, what’s holding up the album,” Smith told The Los Angeles Times. “I keep going back over and redoing them, which is silly. At some point, I have to say that’s it.
He continued: “It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum. I lost my mother and my father and my brother recently, and obviously it had an effect on me. It’s not relentlessly doom and gloom. It has soundscapes on it, like ‘Disintegration’, I suppose. I was trying to create a big palette, a big wash of sound.”
Smith added: “The working title was ‘Live From the Moon’, because I was enthralled by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing in the summer. We had a big moon hanging in the studio and lunar-related stuff lying around. I’ve always been a stargazer.”
The Cure‘s Roger O’Donnell has also described the album as the band’s “most intense, saddest and most emotional record” to date.
Talking to Classic Pop magazine, O’Donnell said: “Four years ago, I said to Robert, ‘We have to make one more record…it has to be the most intense, saddest, most dramatic and most emotional record we’ve ever made, and then we can just walk away from it.’ He agreed. Listening to the demos, it is that record. I think everybody will be happy with it.”
He continued: “The problem is, it’s 12 years since the last album so it becomes precious. When you’ve got a back catalogue like The Cure, it’s a lot to live up to. Robert has said, ‘if The Cure say any more, it had better be important and it had better be fucking good’.
“It is, it’s going to be an amazing record. I just suggest a little patience.”
Back in 2022, The Cure kicked off their 2022 world tour in Latvia tonight, debuting two new songs and welcoming guitarist and keyboardist Perry Bamonte back to the band. At this, the band debuted two new songs, ‘Alone’ and ‘Endsong’.
Other new songs followed on the tour including ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye‘, ‘Another Happy Birthday‘ and ‘A Fragile Thing‘.
On the sound of the new songs live, NME 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”, while ‘Endsong’ is a stunning, sprawling soundscape to portray Smith utterly lost in a universe where there’s “Nothing left of all I loved”.
“The truly devastating heart of the new material previewed comes with ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ – where howling guitars match the singer’s fear of “shadows growing closer now” as “something wicked this way comes, to steal away my brother’s life”. You feel that these songs are for those who mean the world to him.”