80s pop legends’ first new album in 16 years is outselling the rest of the UK top 10-Asyia Iftikhar-Entertainment – Metro

The Cure have made an astonishing splash with their new album, Songs of a Lost World (Picture: Getty)

80s rock band The Cure has blown the rest of the UK Top 10 out of the water after dropping their long-awaited new album, Songs of a Lost World.

It comes 16 years after their previous studio album, 2008’s 4:13 Dream, and has already made quite an impression on fans and critics alike – not least in its impressive sales figures.

The 14th studio album – composed solely by frontman Robert Smith – features eight tracks including the lead single, Alone. Since its release on November 1, it has racked up 40,918 sales per Music Week.

This comprises of 36,970 physical sales, 2,838 downloads and 1,110 sales.

For comparison, coming in at second place was pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s with a tenth of the sale at  4,877 and Tyler the Creator in third with 4,408.

Given this spectacular head start the Official Charts Company has stated The Cure are well on their way to their first number one album in 32 years. They last achieved this with the 1992 LP Wish.

It’s the first new material in 16 years (Picture: REX/Shutterstock)

Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia, Bastille’s & and Chappell Roan’s Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess are all comfortably in the top 10 for now. But The Cure could swoop in to shake things up imminently.

And if critics’ reviews are anything to go by, the acclaim is well-deserved.

As Pitchfork praised: ‘Perhaps the greatest compliment to pay Songs of a Lost World is that it already feels inevitable, a work of wisdom and grace that extends naturally from the moment the Cure took up their instruments in a local church hall all those years ago.’

Meanwhile, The Guardian’s five-star review echoed: ‘It’s powerful, possessed of a dark beauty and frequently moving in a manner that feels different to anything they’ve released before.’

Tyler, the Creator and Sabrina Carpenter didn’t even come close (Picture: Getty/ Dave Benett)

The Friday I’m In Love hitmakers launched the new material with an intimate sold-out show at London’s Troxy and Robert has already shared plans to do a full world tour in 2025 and beyond.

In a wide-spanning interview, he revealed there was an almost-finished second album and hopes to perform live.

‘The next time we go out on stage will be autumn next year,’ the 65-year-old revealed.

‘But then we’ll probably be playing quite regularly through until the next anniversary – the 2028 anniversary! It’s looming on the horizon.

‘The 2018 one, I started to think about in late 2016, thinking, “I’ve got a year and a half, it’s easy!” And yet I still didn’t manage to get there in time. Now, I’m starting to think, “2028, I must get things in order”; so [that’s] the documentary film and things like that.’

Robert Smith has also been making strange remarks about training sheep (Picture: WireImage)

All this to say, there’s plenty on the horizon for The Cure fans to look forward to in the coming years.

But the new album is not the only reason Robert has been making headlines this week.

The alt-rock guitarist, known for his vampire aesthetic, revealed to  Jo Whiley for BBC Radio 2 that he has some bizarre plans to change up the sheep sleep cycle to match his lifestyle.

‘Apparently, you can’t train sheep, but I’m determined,’ he said on the show. Although he anticipated it could become ‘another viral moment.’

And it was his nocturnal way of life that also motivated him to start a band.

‘My reason for being in a band was primarily so I didn’t have to get up for work,’ he explained, with his bedtime at sunrise.

He continued: ‘The others all get up, they’re all daytime people, and I honestly go to bed at like… I do listen to the Breakfast Show and I do watch the sun come out, and then I go to bed.’

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