Songs of a Lost World

Smith wrote every song himself, the first time he had done so since The Head on the Door. Most of the album was recorded in 2019, and five of the songs were played live in 2022 and 2023. Bamonte rejoined for the tour but is not on the record. Mary Poole said that people would not listen to the album, which led to Warsong and Drone:Nodrone being added, and Bodiam Sky was cut. I Can Never Say Goodbye was written after the death of Smith's brother. Endsong was inspired by a starlit night that recalled watching the Apollo 11 landing with his father. The cover shows Janez Pirnat's sculpture Bagatelle from 1975, with design by Andy Vella.

It reached number one in Britain with 51,362 first-week sales, the first for the band since Wish, and number four on the Billboard 200. Metacritic scored it 93 out of 100 from 25 critics. NME's Andrew Trendell gave it five stars and heard colour in the black and flowers on the grave. Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield called it the best Cure album since Disintegration, and AllMusic's Fred Thomas compared it with that record, only without any of the playful pop. The launch show at the Troxy in London on 1 November became the live album Songs of a Live World.

Alexis Petridis wrote in the Guardian that the record was dark, personal and their best since Disintegration. He tied it to the deaths of Smith's brother, aunts and uncles during the sixteen-year gap, praised the piano on And Nothing Is Forever, the feedback-laden guitar on Drone:Nodrone and the synthesiser on I Can Never Say Goodbye, and heard Gallup's bass as a visceral growl. Warsong, he noted, is a rare piece of social commentary for the band. At the Troxy, Luke Turner reported, I Can Never Say Goodbye faded to leave Smith singing the line about his brother alone. When it reached number one, Smith called the response enormously uplifting. It was the band's first chart-topping album in 32 years, and only their second of fourteen studio albums to reach the top, and it outsold the rest of that week's top five combined. The launch stream is also preserved on archive.org.