‘It doesn’t matter if we all die,’ Robert Smith declared in ‘One Hundred Years’, the caustic opening track for The Cure’s fourth album Pornography. Released in 1982, it showed the then 23-year-old’s youthful and insouciant attitude to death, a presiding theme of his work which stemmed from a love of Romantic poets and a ceaseless desire to inject urgency into his lyrics.

Now the end is in sight for everyone’s favourite eternal goths. ‘I’m 70 in 2029,’ Smith recently told Matt Everitt on 6Music, ‘and that’s the 50th anniversary of the first Cure album... if I make it that far.’ He’s shifted from fixating on mortality with gusto to making sure The Cure’s legacy receives a worthy testament long after he’s gone. 

The contents of that testament are up for debate as, while his bat’s nest hairdo remains eternal, Smith’s band have been chameleonic in their output. To watch one of their notoriously long gigs (which have been known to hit the four-hour mark) is to stand in awe of a back catalogue which shifts and changes without shedding any of their idiosyncrasies. They’ve produced frantic post-punk, helped birth nihilist goth rock, perfected shimmering synth-pop, toyed with novelty ditties like ‘The Lovecats’, and finished the first decade of their career with the panoramic masterpiece Disintegration.

Despite changes in style both before and after Disintegration, it’s clear that Smith sees its sweeping romanticism and baroque drama as the defining work of his career, the album to remember him by. It joins Pornography and 2000’s Bloodflowers as a trilogy discussing ageing and loss, revelling in long instrumental sections and production that foregrounds ambience more than hooks. In short, these aren’t works desperate to top the charts. 

New album Songs Of A Lost World may mark a fourth entry in this series. ‘This is the end of every song that we sing,’ exhales Smith on lead single ‘Alone’, which begins with an ephemeral swirl of noise recalling ‘Plainsong’ before moving into a stark, heartrending lamentation on grief. Taking inspiration from Ernest Dowson’s 1899 poem ‘Dregs’, death here is not simply a shortcut to grand themes: it is a totality, a mysterious and terrifying void. 

The single is as lyrically rich as Smith has ever been, in part because he spent 16 years writing instrumentals until he finally had something to say; he lost both of his parents and his brother while Songs Of A Lost World was being conceived, and their absence hangs heavily over the record. This may or may not be the final album we receive from The Cure (Smith has intimated that two more are in the works), but it may be the last which allows him to be quite so vulnerable.

Songs Of A Lost World is out now on Polydor.