The Cure frontman Robert Smith has revealed that the group’s next album will be a mix of brand new material and unused material from 2008’s 4:13 Dream, their most recent record.
Smith wanted that album to be a double, but a single album was eventually released.
Speaking to NME following the group’s performance for Teenage Cancer Trust at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Saturday (March 29), Smith said of the album: “There’s new stuff that we’re doing with this line-up and stuff we finished with the old line-up.”
Asked why it’s taken so long to release the tracks, Smith said: “Honestly? Just pure bloody mindedness. I was so fucking angry that [the label] wouldn’t release a double album that I wouldn’t give them the other songs.”
The album also follows the solidification of a new line-up of The Cure, featuring Reeves Gabrels on guitar. Smith said that the new line-up was the catalyst for adding new material to the 4:13 Dream leftovers.
“A lot of stuff happened, unfortunately, with the last line-up of the band,” said the frontman. “People forget sometimes that even when you get older, when you play music with people, there’s a very intense relationship there and when that breaks down then it’s very difficult to just pretend it doesn’t matter. The last line-up, there were a number of reasons why I felt unable to complete what we were doing. It was impossible to just get another line-up and bang out the songs we didn’t release; it would have been wrong.”
Reflecting its turbulent origins, the album is tentatively named 4:14 Scream, but Smith believes it’s “a dreadful title. Andy who does our covers has done a really great album cover for it, a kind of pastiche of me doing a scream, so maybe we’ll keep it. It’s one of those reverse psychology things, where it’s so bad it’s good.”
In addition to the new album, the band have said that they will also be releasing a series of live concert DVDs this year, and are planning on taking another ‘Trilogy’ style tour on the road later this year. The original tour took place in 2002 and saw The Cure headline a string of festivals and gigs in Brussels and Berlin in which they played the albums Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers in their entirety. The second tour under the title in 2011 called Reflections saw Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds and Faith performed in full.