There is something so cathartically bleak about Songs of a Lost World, so epically pessimistic and emotionally wrought, that the results are perversely invigorating, transmuting powerful feelings of loss, grief, anxiety, anger and self-doubt into a work of such grandeur it leaves the listener strangely exhilarated and uplifted.

Songs of a Lost World is a true return to the desolate beauty of their 80s heyday.

Even with its minor misstep, Songs of a Lost World is a singularly sombre picture of triumph, a band in their collective 60s still making music so vital and beautiful it can genuinely steal the words from your mouth and the heat from the room.

Songs of a Lost World isn't just an album of unlikely listenability, though. It's a new chaper late-in-the-game so unexpectedly powerful that it's nothing short of stunning, and just as unexpectedly, it ranks among the band's best work.

As an overall achievement, “Lost World” is Smith’s most fully realized and most mature artistic statement.

It doesn’t sound so much like a culmination of the band’s entire catalog, but a maturing of that darker facet that’s revealed itself in different forms over the years.

Songs of a Lost World may not be a vast step up in quality from the highlights of Bloodflowers, 4:13 Dream, or whatever your favorite is of the band’s post-Wish records. (Opinions vary wildly.) But it feels like a record whose time is right, delivering a concentrated dose of the Cure and cutting the fat that dogged their later albums.