the cure at msg
photo by PSquared

Robert Smith has spent 2020 "finishing off" The Cure's new album & a solo LP

Robert Smith is on the new Gorillaz single “Strange Timez” and he Damon Albarn called in to Steve Lamacq ‘s BBC 6 radio show to talk about it and other things, like the status of that new Cure album that was supposed to be out already. “I’ll just come up with an imaginary date,” Smith joked to Lamacq’s inquiry of when they album’s coming out. “Pick one.”

While Lamacq couldn’t pink Robert down to a release date, Robert did say that the pandemic has made for an unusually productive year. “I feel really sorry for the people who had plans this year, it’s been a disaster. From my own perspective it’s great that we got so much done last year. This year has just been – just not a year – it’s just been completely weird.”

The new Cure album, which Smith has been saying is one of the darkest things the band has ever made, is just one of a few projects in the works for Smith, including a long-rumored solo album and Cure documentary by longtime collaborator Tim Pope. “Our whole idea for this year was really finishing off the album we started last year, me finishing off the solo album and also, finishing digitising decades of stuff in order to make this film with Tim Pope about the history of the band. So, it’s actually benefited me because there have been no other distractions, so I’ve actually got a lot of what I wanted to do, done.”

Smith said that Albarn’s request to appear on a Gorillaz track came “in the middle of finishing off the big song at the end of The Cure album” which he says is “10 minutes of intense doom and gloom.”

The Gorillaz song, though, is not gloomy at all. “Most of the stuff I’m asked to collaborate on is actually not anything like what The Cure does. And it’s actually those things over the years that I’ve found the most attractive to do, because it puts me outside of where I normally am. There’s a great sense of relief in doing this Gorillaz thing, because I can muck about. It was a lot of fun.”

Check out photos from The Cure’s 2016 run at Madison Square Garden.