Anglo-American society never quite embraced Samuel Johnson’s idea that “nothing odd will do long.” His reference point was Tristram Shandy (1766), Laurence Sterne’s odd autobiographical novel filled with so many asides and digressions that it eventually cops to its own pointlessness. Though right about the trend-setting potential of Tristram Shandy, Dr. Johnson was completely wrong about oddity within culture.

Amid the conformity of British capitalism and especially that of the American version, oddity endures but is constantly displaced by new oddities vying for consumer attention. We are often too busy or too incurious about the previously odd to track its subsequent fate. History being full of curios and oddities is what makes it seem clunky, non-seamless, and non-optimized to devotees of presentism. The internet dutifully organizes the previously avant-garde within a mainstream buffet, enabling consumers to pick and choose the “alt” to suit current tastes and esthetics (tattoos, piercings, Doc Martens) without the bother of historical context.

I find it heartening that despite so much commodification of oddity, we still have The Cure. Robert Smith’s band is a prime example of the many divergences between British and American culture: they know The Cure for the singularity of the music; we know The Cure for the memes. Gen X comedy writers have squeezed every last laugh out of the Goth teen subculture for the length of many people’s lives—and I will admit that the indefatigability of Goth-craft is both funny and endearing.

When I read in the fall of 2024 that The Cure was coming out with its first studio album in 16 years, I was struck by how much I’d taken their decades of work for granted. I first danced to “The Love Cats” before there was a category to sell the band to the mainstream. It couldn’t be rolled up into New Wave; the culture did not yet have that mental reference point of Wynona Ryder in Beetlejuice. In his 2019 speech inducting The Cure into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails praised the band for having created “a completely self-contained world with its own sound, its own look, its own vibe, its own aesthetic, its own rules.” How true—and how rare is The Cure.

No other performers sound like them. The band is synonymous with Smith’s enigmatic voice, but it’s not a single persona that draws new fans with every generation; it’s the sumptuous atmosphere of the music—not “look at me” but “enter here.” Their music is big—shimmering, gorgeous, haunting. What the Goth kid meme gets wrong is the idea that Cure fans are narcissistically burrowing into a tiny core of heartbreak and disappointment when in fact they are pushing a boundary into an enormity of feeling—a place where they may get hurt but are free to experience the fleeting beauty of human existence.

Songs of a Lost World was released on November 1, 2024, but before I could listen, the presidential election delivered another round of trauma that ought to have been expected but was somehow not. Weeks later, when I finally heard these eight songs written by Smith, they seemed to be telling the real-time story of what many in America were feeling. Or more rightly: of what many across the world were fearing.

The Cure has never been about social causes. Smith sings about things good and bad that happen to us as individuals. Songs of a Lost World is different, rife with anger and anguish on a scale beyond the personal. You might argue that this disposition comes with age. Though Smith still makes up his face for the everyday, he is a gray-headed senior whose friends and family are beginning to leave the earth. “I Can Never Say Goodbye” is in fact about the death of his older brother Richard. But I don’t think “the end” that he mourns here is physical life. He’s been singing about that “end” since his own artistic beginning.

I’ve heard warnings about “the end” of the American Empire for most of my life. It happened to Britain and would surely happen to us with the rise of China and India. I think what we face under the Trump regime is something much greater, more like the title of the last book Jane Jacobs published before her death in 2006: Dark Age Ahead. In it she warns that American society is vulnerable to losing its cultural memory, that cultural collapse would usher in a Dark Age. The simultaneous breakdown of five pillars of society, she argues, could prove fatal to a thriving democracy: community and family, taxation and government, science and technology, higher education, and the self-regulation of learned professions.

Smith’s lamentations in Songs of a Lost World would suggest that this Dark Age is already upon us. He looks out at the visible world, at the strained relationships and violence, at his own lost dreams and sees a brutal reality of things no longer adding up. Things and parts of things are missing: “All I ever am / Is somehow never quite all I am now.” Where were we when things got so optimized that they began feasting on themselves? Where was our attention? Though he doesn’t blame, he wrangles in perpetual distress over this massive societal backsliding.

Most of us know of Atlantis as the lost city/civilization of our collective imagination. It piques our historical curiosity as the missing link—the critical part to understanding why humanity appears to have mysteriously raced ahead and just as mysteriously fallen back and away into the dark layers of igneous rock. In the world of today, the neoliberal order has reigned for a mere 35 years, and yet this world has never seemed so small.

Donald Trump—malignant narcissist from the start but now a malignant narcissist with dementia—is the accelerator of Jacobs’s Dark Age. He doesn’t care about human life—shuts down the lifesaving work of USAID and cancer research, hunts and cages immigrants like animals, deserts allies in Ukraine, blows apart fishermen in their boats, turns the entire Middle East into a crucible and vaporizes a school full of Iranian girls. He knows he’s going to die soon and he’s vindictively taking away life from millions.

What this zealot’s regime has revealed to Americans is a homegrown oligarchy in full bloom. These are not Russian thugs from Gazprom but household names—Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Ellison père et fils, whatever Elon Musk currently calls the Frankenstein he’s made of his overleveraged companies. Call it the Epstein class, no better than the worst of Eurasian money launderers. It was a jolt to see the Silicon Valley chapter of Epstein so keen on playing the Peter Thiel style billionaire—no filter on believing that their own lives matter more than entire populations, prioritizing their own longevity over the continuation of humanity. Thanks to Trump and his Nero’s court of tech bros, we have become a malign entity to our former European allies.

Jane Jacobs was eerily spot-on in naming the structures whose collapse could take the whole thing down. Community and Family: Trump’s Republicans have gut Medicaid and SNAP to fund the ICE and Border Control agents that are terrorizing families and communities. Taxation: The top 10% of Americans own 70% of U.S. wealth while Trump’s tariff extortion racket is placing the greatest tax burden on the working poor and middle class. Government: Trump’s Republicans have gut public services across all agencies including shutting down the Department of Education; they have defaced, distorted, and destroyed our public monuments. Science: Trump’s deranged HHS director is questioning established science and medicine and putting children at risk for dangerous diseases. Technology: Silicon Valley continues to saturate our lives with deceptive AI without regulation. Higher Education: Trump has mercilessly extorted elite universities to surrender their independence. Self-Regulation of Learned Professions: He was equally successful in extorting members of the legal profession.

Robert Smith could not have known that the release of The Cure’s fourteenth studio album would coincide with Donald Trump’s reelection. But the fierce pain in these songs speaks to the same betrayal of hopes and dreams. Our loss is not just of moral and ethical solvency but of a language that can defend their importance. Though the pain is centered in individual lives, there is a grandeur in how we grieve for a universal we discover to be no longer there.

In “Warsong,” Smith sings of hate as our most available emotion: “And we hate ourselves for everything we do / The shame, wounded pride, vengeful anger burning deep inside.” How do we fight? “For bitter ends we tear the night in two.” In “Drone:Nodrone,” the isolation of technology makes us addicts of destruction: “I lose my reason when I fall through the door / Endless black night lost in looking for more.”

“Alone,” the album’s most wrenching song, adapts a line from “Dregs” by the Decadent poet Ernest Dowson: “This is the end of every song that we sing.” Every song stops, and the only thing left is to toast the dregs and dream:

And the birds falling out of our skies
And the words falling out of our minds
And here is to love, to all the love
Falling out of our lives

If there’s a villain in these songs it’s a culture that’s poisoned every well. In many ways the album stands as a bookend to Disintegration, the band’s masterpiece from 1989. In the eponymous track—a thrashing cri de coeur about not just a crumbling relationship but a crumbling household with “pictures of trickery” and “stains on the scenery”—the distraught, self-flagellating deceiver is about to “leave you with babies and hoping for secrecy.” Backed into a corner, he erupts: “I never said I would stay to the end.” Thiry-five years later, Smith begins “And Nothing Is Forever” with “Promise you’ll be with me in the end.”

Quite amazingly, Smith’s voice sounds the same as his younger days, and you could be fooled into feeling a through-line to the past. But I recommend believing the tale, not the teller. Many constitutionally minded Americans feel as bereft as Smith’s avatars, doubtful that the midterms will get us out of this. Though one malignant narcissist can inflict pain and suffering on a macro scale, the societal failures that gave us Trump are happening at the micro level. The suppressed detritus of Jeffrey Epstein is historically significant not because it might bring down Trump, but because it has made us look at the moral rot his class has inflicted on generations. Even the professional classes have lived in servitude to the Epstein class—lived there willingly and deferentially—only they offloaded the shame of it onto the uneducated and the poor. The Epstein era was all about compliance with oligarchs who remained redacted. We signed everything over, clicked the box without reading any Terms and Conditions.

I read Dark Age Ahead when it was new, and I remember two concurrent events: Abu Ghraib and the marketing of the iPod. I found it mystifying that practically an entire generation happily gave Apple their date of birth to open an iTunes account. Eventually their parents and grandparents did the same. It’s as if they willed into existence the iPhone and Apple Wallet just to be able to give more of themselves. Seventy-five Million Characters in Search of an Author.

For many, the Epstein coverup has been a treacherous awakening to what each of us has failed to see now that it’s too late. Images and feelings about our democracy that still seem vivid to us exist in an increasingly distant and alien past. Our personal memories of what the American collective knew as “the good” are being lost to us by the day as AI takes on our thinking and reasoning. It’s interesting that the chips the oligarchs need to be able to shove AI down our throats require the global extraction of elements known as “rare earths.” Even within the Death Valley terrain of Donald Trump’s skull, “rare earths” keeps percolating to the top. “Rare earths” is a strange oxymoron: if there were multiple Earths, ours wouldn’t be so rare.

Carl Sagan said as much about the cosmic rarity of this planet (liquid water, atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, stable star at its core): “We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can.” And yet thinking is the one thing we no longer want to do. Thankfully, we still have the oddity of The Cure and Robert Smith: “I think too much of all that’s gone.” §