Robert Smith hints that The Cure's next album will be their last

The Cure's 14th album has been a long time coming, and it might be the one to complete their discography.

During a recent interview with The Sunday Times, Robert Smith insinuated that the upcoming record may be their last. “It’s ten years of life distilled into a couple of hours of intense stuff. I can’t think we’ll ever do anything else," he said bluntly.

The band released its last album, 4:13 Dream, in 2008, and Smith admitted the delay was at least partly due to writer's block. “I’ve struggled more with finishing the words to these new Cure recordings than at any other point,” he divulged. “We recorded 20-odd songs and I wrote nothing. I mean, I wrote a lot, but at the end I looked at it and thought, ‘This is rubbish.’”

“The difficulty is I’ve become such a harsh critic of myself I think, ‘Who’s going to be interested in that?’ It is really that bad," Smith continued. "I was listening, thinking this is the best music this band has made and my words are drivel.”

In fact, his self-criticism got so bad that at one point the singer considered scrapping the lyrics all together and putting out an instrumental album. “Last year I just gave up. I thought, ‘I can’t do it. They can all be instrumentals,’” Smith said. “And this year I sort of came back to it. Last year was difficult for a number of reasons, not least the pandemic, but what I wrote this year I have enjoyed.”