The Cure emerges from grief to show its most festive side at Primavera

BarcelonaThe return of The Cure to the stage, after a year and a half of stoppage, showed them in a very different incarnation from their previous visit to the Palau Sant Jordi, in November 2022. At that time they were presenting the album Songs of a lost world, marked by the death of the parents and a brother of the band's leader, Robert Smith. The group has also lost guitarist and keyboardist Perry Bamonte, who died in December. Despite this accumulation of sadness, the Cure who triumphantly took the main stage of Primavera Sound as headliners this Friday left all that grief behind to offer their most festive and festival-appropriate repertoire, with a very generous selection of singles, out of the fifty or so they have released in almost half a century of existence.

It was a long concert, a hallmark of the band, two and a half hours. Eden Gallup, son of bassist Simon Gallup — the longest-serving member by far, apart from the singer himself — took on Bamonte's duties, as he has on occasion in cases of temporary absences, but they have not announced whether his incorporation will now be as a full member of The Cure. The band sounded as always: compact and winning, with songs honed over a thousand concerts, although Smith always knows how to give them a playful twist thanks to a voice that remains intact despite nearing seventy. Eighty's classics like The walk

, Let’s go to bed, Play for today and The lovecats were sung by the audience not only for the sung parts but also for the instrumental ones. That was The Cure in their most lololo version. And it worked. 

This desire to mark a festival profile meant that, even though from the release of the last album they had already warned that they had recorded material to release another album of a similar tone, the band did not take advantage of this return to premiere any of them, as a taste. There were gestures for the most hardened fans, such as rescuing 2 late, which was the B-side of Love song, and which they had not played since 2019. Mint car, alt.end, and Wrong number had also been on the bench for a long time and on Friday they re-entered the rotation. Rescuing this last song suggests that The Cure, beyond the typical image of depressive gothic barons, also want to claim a fairly pure rock and roll soul, as was also seen with Hot, hot, hot!!!, which dispenses with usual pedals like the flanger or the chorus in favor of more natural, less atmospheric riffs. After all, the next Rolling Stones album features a collaboration with Robert Smith that reinforces this taste for pure rock.

"I will lose myself in time, it won’t be long" ("I will lose myself in time, it won't be long"). These are verses from the song Endsong with which the band's last album closes, one of the most heartbreaking songs they have ever written and which served to close the main block of the performance, before the encores, which included Friday, i'm in love, Close to me, and Boys don't cry. Judging by the euphoric shout "I hope to see you soon!" with which he said goodbye and also the announced preparations to celebrate the band's 50th anniversary in 2028, everything suggests that Smith and company feel stronger about continuing to defend their legacy than the lyrics might suggest.

From industry to the cutting edge

Hours earlier, the also veteran Einstürzende Neubauten filled the Auditorium stage with all the junk that usually accompanies these postmodern luthiers. Although they are no longer that industrial sonic assault that scared the neighborhood cats with their squeaks, this more controlled and avant-garde version of the German group remains intense and contains its own grammar full of interesting sonorities. A heartwarming and comical moment was when the leader, Blixa Bargeld, presented with great fanfare the shopping cart with which they would later perform Grazer Damm: he explained that the one from 1984 was already too rusty. And since the new one must have had a GPS chip inside, as he recounted, someone from New Zealand must have been wondering how on earth that stolen cart had ended up so far away. 

The concert served to introduce the group's new member, Josefine Lukschy, who replaces the historic Alexander Hacke, with more than 40 years of career in the group. They were not easy shoes to fill, because in Neubauten the bass line is the essential cushion that allows all the metallic percussions of the rest of the band and Bargeld's iconic screams to be built upon it. But she graduated with honors and received the loudest applause of the afternoon. The concert drew mainly from recent albums and worked very well because it is in live performances that the physicality of their music is best appreciated. Bargeld was happy, even euphoric, and dedicated a song to his trans son, encouraging the audience to rebel against biological determinism. 

Another highlight of the day was the performance by the Swedish band Viagra Boys. Their wild rock intentionally wallows in aesthetics —singer Sebastian Murphy is a poem in himself— but the band is very tight and, at the same time, can afford jams like the one in the final song, Research chemicals, with which they turned this ode to a bad trip into an explosion of paranoid notes that lasted a quarter of an hour thanks to the free jazz solo by saxophonist Oskar Carls. In line with the political charge of their lyrics, between delirious and sarcastic, there was an applauded anti-fascist exhortation and shouts in favor of Palestine. The performance time felt short even though it ended at four in the morning and there was great excitement among the audience with classics like Troglodyte, Ain’t no thief, and Man made of meat. Of course, fewer people reached the end of the concert than those who started it: it wasn't two minutes before the security staff kindly invited some member of the audience with flying tendencies to leave the venue.