Endsong

The Cure's "Endsong," the closing track on their 2024 album Songs of a Lost World, is a lament for both time and the times. Robert Smith drifts through the cosmos of personal memory and societal collapse, finding beauty in melancholy.

The track's origins lie under a night sky. One summer, while stargazing, Smith was struck by a sense of loss - not just for the world's better days but for his own. "I was outside looking up and back a lot that summer, lamenting age and an increasingly broken world," he recalled. "I always seemed to return to the same two questions: where did that old world go, and where did I go?"

Smith's reflections are tethered to a specific memory: stargazing with his father during the Apollo 11 moon landing. "I remembered the feeling of, like, 'I didn't believe it,'" Smith shared. Growing up in what he described as the "glorious 30 years from the end of the Second World War," Smith was imbued with a sense of optimism. "The world that I was born into was getting incrementally better every year. The moon landing was part of that. But around the time I turned 16 in '75, it seemed like the world sort of stalled, and it's been traveling down ever since."