Ending Up As Nobody

The Cure “Drone:Nodrone”

Robert Smith has been dwelling on his mortality since the start of his career, and as a young man seemed to operate on the assumption that he had to get as much done as he could before he ran out of time. This is why hearing him ponder his “one last shot at happiness” in “Drone:Nodrone” hits me so hard—it’s very dramatic but doesn’t sound hyperbolic. He seems genuinely concerned that he’s running out of opportunities to find peace and joy, and doubtful that it’s possible in the first place.

“Drone:Nodrone” is something of an outlier on Songs of a Lost World—an aggressive and relatively up-tempo song along the lines of 1997’s “Wrong Number” on an album that mostly feels like “Oops! All Plainsongs.” In this context it provides a dynamic shift away from grandiose expressions of grief and zeroes in on Smith’s frustration. He sounds exasperated by getting to his age without having “answers,” and warns the listener that the answers he does have “are not the answers you want” because the only conclusion he’s come to with any confidence is that he doesn’t know anything. There can be peace and joy in embracing this humility, but he mostly seems horrified by the pointlessness and endless mystery.

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