The Cure singer and emo icon Robert Smith says he struggles to write songs about death now that he's older

"I can write words but I don't really feel like singing them."

Robert Smith's macabre sensibilities helped launch the Cure to massive success — but nowadays the musician is finding it harder to write about songs about death.

The "Just Like Heaven" singer, 65, reflected on fearing mortality now that it's an older man's sobering reality instead of a younger man's imagination. "Our songs have always had that element of a fear of mortality," Smith said in a recent interview with Uncut. "I've kind of wrestled with it since I was like 8 years old. But as you get older, it becomes more real."

He continued: "We're all growing older at the same rate, give or take, and death and dying become more everyday, unfortunately. And when you're younger, you romanticize it even without knowing it, you romanticize it all. And then it starts happening to people you know, your immediate family and friends, and suddenly it's a different thing and it's something that I struggled with lyrically was to how to put this into the songs."

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The songwriter suggested that performing new music isn't as easy as it used to be. "It's the one thing that as I've grown older, I've found much much harder to do — write words that I want to sing," he said in an interview with BBC. "I can write words but I don't really feel like singing them. So to arrive at that point where I think that it's worth singing these songs, it has become really, really hard."

However, Smith clarified that he still finds performing meaningful. "You just suddenly feel something. You feel connection," he mused. "And that's the reason why I still do it, to experience that communal moment with a crowd. There's something really, really wonderful about it."

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The Cure released Songs of a Lost World, their first album of new material since 2008, on Friday. "I didn't want the album to be too much," Smith said. "The tone of the album, I wanted it to be about loss and change. And I always keep coming back to this thing — essentially, it really is quite a doom and gloom record. I just can't escape it, because when I was writing, when I was singing, that's how I felt. I think what helped me was singing the songs, and certainly singing the songs in front of people was hugely cathartic."

Smith experienced an overwhelming amount of grief in the period since the group's last album. "It was an awful time," he said. "The entire older generation of my family died in the first few months of the first round of Covid, so it's not really sweetness and light."

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However, Smith's wife, Mary Poole, encouraged him to inject a glimmer of hope into the record. "It was Mary that said to me, 'No, no, no no, your best albums are the ones that just have a couple of bits where it's not that," he said. "I was finishing the really big doom and gloom ones and she was like, 'Do some of the other ones!' She was right because I think I would've ended up with something that was a bit too much, actually."

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