1982
Songs of a
Lost World
2024
Two records that sound like siblings, made under opposite conditions. One was finished before the band fell apart. The other took so long the band nearly forgot how to stop. What follows is the tape, the room, the gear, and the argument.
The argument
In 1982 The Cure had twenty four tracks of two inch tape, a booked room, a label paying by the hour, and no way to undo anything. They made the most extreme record of their career in about three weeks and then detonated.
In 2019 they recorded roughly twenty six songs at Rockfield and had every advantage the first session lacked. Unlimited tracks. Total recall. No clock. The album came out in November 2024. Robert Smith spent a chunk of those years unable to stop working on it, and he has been unusually plain about why.
That sentence is the spine of this piece. The interesting question is not whether analog beats digital. It is whether the constraint itself was doing work that nobody replaced. Read both sessions side by side and you find a surprising amount of the 1982 method still standing, and a small number of things that changed completely and changed everything.
I. Before the tape rolled
The band that walked into RAK in January 1982 had been on the road almost continuously behind Faith. On that tour they had screened Carnage Visors, a roughly twenty eight minute instrumental score to an animated film by Ric Gallup, Simon's brother, in place of a support act. The film is now lost. Copies are said to exist only with Smith, Gallup and Lol Tolhurst.
Smith has described the period without much decoration. He was in a badly depressed frame of mind between 1981 and 1982, and the band were working around two hundred days a year. His account of what the album was for is the most quoted thing about it: he had two choices, give in completely, or make a record of it and get it out of him.
The stated intent is retrospective.The chemistry
The legend around the sessions is drink, LSD, and a mountain of empty cans in the corner of the control room. Smith has confirmed the band slept in the label's offices to save money. Phil Thornalley, who produced it, has been asked about the stories more than once and does not soften them. His summary is that the nutty stories you have read are all true, and that it was just over the top.
This matters for the studio account rather than the mythology. A band that is chemically wrecked, exhausted, and out of money does not iterate. It commits. Almost every decision on Pornography has the quality of something done once, at volume, and then left alone.
Who was hired, and why it mattered
Smith and Tolhurst briefly met Conny Plank at Fiction's offices and considered him. What they got instead was Phil Thornalley, born January 1960, twenty one years old, who had come up as a tape op and engineer at RAK under Mickie Most, Steve Lillywhite and Alex Sadkin. Mike Nocito also engineered. The sleeve credit reads producer Phil Thornalley and The Cure.
Thornalley has said he and the band were more like contemporaries than producer and client, and that closeness is visible in the result. It also produced the central creative fight of the record. Smith's version is blunt: Phil was trying to make it too nice, and he wanted it to be virtually unbearable. Somebody in that room was pulling toward listenability. The finished album is the tug of war.
Chris Parry at Fiction found exactly one thing on the tape he could sell. "The Hanging Garden" was polished into a single by Thornalley and Smith and got to number 32 in the UK.
II. The room
The single most important technical decision on Pornography was subtractive. They took the acoustic baffles out.
RAK's main room is large. Standard practice in 1982 was to build a small enclosure around a drum kit out of dividers so the engineer could control the bleed and keep the sound tight. Thornalley had the dividers removed so Tolhurst played into the entire space, and then reached for a technique he had learned watching Steve Lillywhite: put a distant Neumann U 87 out in the room, run it through a UREI limiter, and let the limiter suck the room up until the drums arrive like something enormous and slightly wrong.
That is the sound of "One Hundred Years" and "A Strange Day." It is not reverb. It is a real room, compressed until it breathes backward. Nothing on either album is more of its moment than this, and nothing has been more copied since.
There is a persistent rumor about a drum machine here.Signal path, 1982, as documented and inferred
Guitar, bass, and why the low end sits so far forward
Smith's core instrument in this window was his modified Fender Jazzmaster, with a Top 20 pickup added and a finish history that runs natural to white to black, into a Roland JC-120. The JC-120 is solid state, brittle, and unflattering, which is exactly why it works under heavy modulation. The documented modulation is the Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress flanger. The Boss pedals people associate with Smith, the BF-2 and the choruses, generally date to during or after this record rather than before it.
Simon Gallup's bass is mixed further forward than almost anything else in early eighties British rock, and the two note drones he plays are structural rather than supporting. On a record where the guitars are a weather system and the vocal is submerged, the bass is the only thing telling you where you are. That is a mix decision as much as a playing decision, and it survives intact to 2024.
The accident on the title track
For the closing title track the band tried a found music approach borrowed from Eno and Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, dropping live television audio into the session. They happened to tune into a highbrow debate about pornography featuring Germaine Greer and Graham Chapman. Thornalley has been careful to correct the assumption that this was planned: the song already existed, and the coincidence arrived on its own.
It is worth sitting with that for a second. The most conceptually loaded moment on the album is an accident that they kept because printing it was easier than fixing it.
Reception was mostly hostile. The line that stuck came from Dave Hill in NME, who heard the drums, guitars, voice and production pressed into a single surging mass and called it Phil Spector in Hell. Forty two years later that is still the most accurate four word description of the record anyone has written.
The gap
Only the parts that changed the method are here. The rest is a different article.
Strasbourg. Smith and Gallup fight after a show. Gallup quits. They do not speak for over a year.
Hard pivot to pop singles. Tolhurst moves off drums and onto keyboards.
Disintegration. Hookend Manor with David M. Allen. Built on layered synths. Atmosphere returns, made with new tools.
Bloodflowers, with Paul Corkett. Smith names it the third part of a dark trilogy with Pornography and Disintegration.
4:13 Dream, cut down from an intended double. The shelved half becomes a running joke and a real problem.
Rockfield. Roughly 26 songs go to disk. Nothing comes out for five more years.
III. Sixteen years
The Cure recorded around twenty six songs in 2019. Smith's own accounting is that they recorded three albums that year, and that this has always been the problem. Having finished this one, he said, the second is virtually finished as well.
What stalled it was not material. It was confidence and then grief. Smith told NPR on release day that he had a crisis of confidence through the last decade, that he thought he had written everything he had to write, and that as it turned out he had not.
"Alone" came from Smith rediscovering Ernest Dowson's poem "Dregs" in his own journal. The album's centre of gravity is loss: he lost his mother, his father and his brother across this period. "I Can Never Say Goodbye" is about his brother Richard. "Endsong" reaches back to watching the Apollo 11 landing with his father.
The edit
An early version was darker still. Smith's wife Mary Poole told him people would not listen to it. "Warsong" and "Drone:Nodrone" went in, a closing track called "Bodiam Sky" came out, and the record went from thirteen songs to eight. Bodiam Sky's lyrics are still printed in the booklet, which is its own kind of statement. Smith's verdict on the cut is that it is a much better record for it.
Compare that to 1982, where the sequence was essentially whatever survived the session. Here the editing is the work, and it took years.
IV. The second room
The tracking happened at Rockfield in Monmouthshire in 2019 with Smith producing and Paul Corkett engineering and mixing alongside him. Corkett is not a hired outsider. He engineered Wild Mood Swings in 1996, produced Bloodflowers in 2000, and has run front of house for the band for years.
Note what that removes. In 1982 the loudest counterargument in the room came from a producer whose whole job was to make the record work. In 2024 there was nobody in the building whose role was to tell Robert Smith no.
The tour became pre-production, backwards
Five of these songs, "Alone" among them, were played live on the 2022 and 2023 Shows of a Lost World tour before the album was finished. This inverted the usual order: recorded, then toured, then partly re-recorded. Smith's reason is a working musician's reason. They were playing them a lot better than when they recorded them, so he replayed everything with Simon Gallup and then spent more days with Reeves Gabrels.
His note on Gabrels is the most useful sentence in the entire 2024 press cycle for anyone who records people. If Gabrels has an audience in front of him he plays in a totally different way than in the studio, much more expansive, and capturing that was the point. The technology is forty two years newer. The problem is identical: get the version of the player that only exists under pressure.
Then a twist. Smith re-recorded all of his own vocals at home after touring, listened back, and used the 2019 originals anyway.
Signal path, 2024, as documented
What Gabrels actually plugged into
Gabrels has been specific about this, which is a gift. He used Audio Kitchen amps built by Steve Crow. Roughly eighty percent of the record went through one small hybrid of the Audio Kitchen power amp and the Baxandall preamp, which he calls the little thing. Guitars were his Reverend signatures, the RG-SUS with the Sustainer and the Spacehawk, plus his SIB Varidrive tube drive.
Sit that next to 1982. A Jazzmaster into a solid state JC-120 with a flanger, and a Reverend into a boutique hybrid head with a Sustainer. Completely different equipment, identical philosophy: build an atmosphere out of modulated, driven, layered guitar rather than playing riffs.
Smith's six string bass is credited on the sleeve as "6string bass." The Fender Bass VI has become a Schecter UltraCure VI. Same voice, different serial number, forty two years apart.
A lot of the 2024 technical picture is not public.The mix that would not end
At the NME Awards in 2022 Smith said they were mixing the following month, on 1 April. The record came out in November 2024. He has been more candid than most artists about why, and the phrasing is worth keeping: it evolved over two years, it had not always been a good thing to have been left alone with it, and you pick at it like picking at seams until everything falls apart.
What ended it was a hard external stop. The Dolby Atmos mix was done last, at Abbey Road, over a couple of days. Smith's description of that moment is almost relieved: after that you cannot really change anything, and he thought, it's done.
The finish
Matt Colton handled digital and CD mastering. Miles Showell cut the vinyl at Abbey Road using half speed mastering, a slower cut that stresses nothing in the chain. Showell has called it the holy grail of vinyl cutting and has said publicly that digital limiting only serves to lower fidelity. That is a philosophy, not a format, and it is the reason this record has air in it in a year when most do not.
The sleeve uses Bagatelle, a 1975 sculpture by the Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat, designed by Andy Vella from Smith's concept. Smith reportedly found Pirnat's work on the same day he learned the artist had died. He now owns the piece.
One more thing that is not a studio decision but belongs here
Smith pushed the label to price the album low, and he has explained the logic in a way that connects directly to the record's independence. His fights with the label, he told The Times, have all been about how to price things lower, and you do not want to charge as much as the market will let you. The same instinct produced the anti dynamic pricing stand in 2023, twenty dollar tickets on parts of the US tour, and forcing Ticketmaster to refund unduly high fees. A man who spent five years refusing to release a record until it was right is not going to hand it over to a pricing algorithm.
V. The collision
Five things run unbroken from RAK to Rockfield. Five things snapped clean. Switch between them.
1982
Smith's Fender Bass VI carries melodic weight under Gallup's low end. On a record where the guitars are weather and the vocal is submerged, the six string bass is the only thing telling you where you are.
2024
Credited on the sleeve as "6string bass." Now a Schecter UltraCure VI rather than a Fender. Structurally it is doing the identical job it did in 1982, which is why the two records rhyme even though nothing else about them matches.
1982
Jazzmaster into a Roland JC-120, an amp too brittle to flatter anyone, with an Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress smearing the signal. Layer it until it stops being guitar and becomes conditions.
2024
Gabrels through Audio Kitchen amps built by Steve Crow, roughly eighty percent of the record on one small hybrid head. Reverend Sustainer, SIB Varidrive. Different builder, same instinct: modulation and drive as an atmosphere, not an effect.
1982
The vocal is sunk into the wall. The words arrive as weather rather than as a lead line, and the mix never lifts them out to help you.
2024
Smith re-cut every vocal at home after the 2022 tour, then went back and used the 2019 takes. Still low. Still not helping you. Forty two years of technology available to fix that, and he declined.
1982
Baffles pulled out of RAK Studio One so Tolhurst played into the whole space, with a distant U 87 through a UREI limiter sucking the room up until the drums arrive enormous and slightly wrong.
2024
If he's got people in front of him, Reeves plays in a totally different way than in the studio.
So Smith re-recorded after the tour to get the live version of the player. Same problem, same answer, newer gear.
1982
Analog tape, a plate chain, and a hand balanced desk. There was no way to crush the record and no reason anyone would have wanted to. The dynamics are physics, not virtue.
2024
Miles Showell cut it half speed at Abbey Road. His stated position is that digital limiting only lowers fidelity. In 2024 the same result requires somebody to choose it and defend it. That is the real difference.
1982
A 21 year old outside producer in the chair, pulling against the band. Smith's account: Phil was trying to make it too nice.
Somebody in that room was paid to argue for listenability.
2024
Smith self produced with Paul Corkett, a collaborator since 1996 and the band's front of house engineer. Trusted, expert, and structurally unable to be the opposition. Nobody in the building had that job.
1982
The audience heard it after the record existed. Then the 14 Explicit Moments tour nearly ended the band, Smith and Gallup fought in Strasbourg, and Gallup quit.
2024
Five songs played live for two years before the album was finished, then partly re-recorded because of what the touring revealed. The tour functioned as pre production, arriving after the tracking. This has no 1982 equivalent at all.
1982
A booked window, a label paying by the hour, a finite roll of two inch tape, and twenty four tracks. Decisions got made because they had to be made, not because they were right.
2024
Tracked 2019. Announced as mixing on 1 April 2022. Released November 2024. The only deadline was the one Smith kept moving, and moving it cost the record roughly two years and gained it an unknown amount.
1982
Committed at the desk. A print was a decision. The mix was assembled by hand and the accident on the title track survived because keeping it was easier than fixing it.
2024
Total recall. Smith's own diagnosis, unprompted: you pick at it, like picking at seams, and everything falls apart.
The tool that removed every consequence also removed the moment where a take becomes final.
1982
The mix ended it. Lacquer cut, sleeve printed, tour booked, band detonated. Nothing about the format invited further work.
2024
The Dolby Atmos mix at Abbey Road, done last over a couple of days, because after that, you can't really change anything.
An artist in 2024 needed a technical process to function as a door closing behind him.
VI. The arithmetic
VII. What still works
Strip out the equipment and three things do the heavy lifting on both records, and they are the same three things.
A real room, captured honestly. Thornalley pulled the baffles out of RAK because a big space compressed hard sounds like nothing you can build. Nobody has improved on that. Every convolution reverb and every drum sample library exists because engineers keep trying to get back to it. If you have access to a room, use the room. That advice was correct in 1982 and it is correct this afternoon.
The version of the player that only exists under pressure. Smith re-recorded parts of a finished album in 2024 because two years of touring had made the band better at their own songs, and because Gabrels plays differently with people in front of him. That is not nostalgia and it is not analog worship. It is a producer noticing that performance is a variable you can improve and choosing to spend real money improving it. The 2019 files were fine. Fine was not the target.
Something that makes it stop. This is the one that has genuinely degraded. In 1982 the format ended the record. Tape ran out, money ran out, the room was booked by somebody else on Monday. In 2024 nothing ends a record except the person making it, and the most successful songwriter of his generation needed a Dolby Atmos session at Abbey Road to function as a door closing behind him.
The lesson is not to go buy tape. It is that the constraint was doing a job, and if you remove it you have to replace it deliberately. Book the room for eight days and mean it. Print the mix and live with it for a week. Decide in advance what finished looks like, because the software will never tell you.
The other lesson is quieter and it runs the other way. Pornography is a magnificent record made by people who could not stop themselves from destroying something. Songs of a Lost World is a magnificent record made by a man who could not stop himself from improving something. Both are failure modes. Only one of them lets you make another album in two years.
Forty two years apart, the same six string bass, the same buried voice, the same wall of modulated guitar, and the same fundamental bet: that atmosphere outlasts hooks. The gear is unrecognisable. The method is almost unchanged. What changed is that nothing external is left to tell Robert Smith when he is done, and he has been honest enough to say that out loud.