Robert Smith Explains the Cure’s Forthcoming ‘4:14 Scream’ Album
After making seemingly dismissive comments about the Cure‘s forthcoming 4:14 Scream LP, frontman Robert Smith has explained how the album came together and why he is indeed happy with it.
In a post on the Cure website titled “As Clearly and Succinctly as I Can,” the wiry-haired frontman said that the band had planned 33 songs for its 2008 release 4:13 Dream, but due to external pressures to make a commercial record and the fact that he “ran out of the energy and conviction [he] needed” to resist said pressure, he stripped it down to the 13 songs on the album. After a period of reflection, he decided the Cure should put out two releases this year: the previously mentioned 4:14 Scream, which would contain some of the songs he had abandoned in 2007, and 4:26 Dream, a double album of all of the songs.
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Earlier this week, Smith had expressed bemusement about the new album in an interview with the U.K.’s XFM. “I’m trying to be convinced that I should release what is the second half of an album that effectively came out in 2008,” he said. “It’s a bit of a sore point, to be honest.”
Now, in the self-rebuttal on the Cure’s website, he is saying that 4:13 Dream was an “excellent Cure album,” but that the “culmination of the project wasn’t quite what it should have been.” His vision for the album in 2007 was a double album containing two hours of music. Each LP would contain 13 songs, “most with words and vocals, but a few with words and no vocals (i.e., ‘instrumentals with words’),” in his words. It all had a fluid running order, but was then abandoned the double-album idea as the pressures mounted.
“Compiling a single CD album required a different approach (for one thing there was no longer the time to ‘spread out’ and connect the different moods as I had originally intended),” Smith wrote. “And as a consequence a number of (my favorite!) slower songs and instrumental pieces were left unfinished and unreleased.”
After reviewing their Live in Paris 2008 film in 2011, he decided to revisit the unused music. He liked what he heard, but felt the lyrics could be reworked. Now, three years after that, the music is ready for release.
The Cure intend to release both 4:26 Dream, a limited-edition double CD of all 26 songs remixed, including the instrumentals with words and 10 previously unreleased songs, and 4:14 Scream, which will contain 14 unreleased songs. The 4:14 Scream tracks will contain words and vocals, as opposed to the versions he considers “instrumentals with words.” Neither of these records have release dates, but he aims to have them ready within one to three months.
He finished the missive by saying he hopes to record “some new new music” with the current lineup of the group – after he finishes all these projects.