The Cure will play concerts in 2027, and the sets will carry new material. Robert Smith said so himself, in a short pre-recorded segment for BBC Radio 6 Music tied to the band's nomination for the station's 2026 Artist of the Year. "I'm looking forward to more Cure concerts in 2027," he said. "Of course I'm not allowed to say where or when yet, but I'm confident they'll be bursting with new songs."
The wording matters as much as the news. Smith has spent the past two years talking about a follow-up to Songs from a Lost World, the 2024 album that ended a sixteen-year silence, and a release date still has not been announced. Now the touring calendar is being built around songs nobody has heard. That is a different order of operations from the usual reunion arithmetic, where a record lands first and the sheds fill afterward.
There is a history to lean on here. The Cure have long used the road as a workshop, airing unreleased material in front of audiences long before it reaches a studio version, and Smith has spoken before about how a song changes once a room has answered it. A 2027 run described as "bursting" suggests that process is already underway, or about to be. What to listen for, if the setlists surface, is which new songs survive the winter and which quietly disappear.
The nomination itself is a small irony: a band whose last album arrived in 2024, and whose next is still a rumor with a year attached, up for Artist of the Year on a station that has carried them since the post-punk years. Smith's acceptance was characteristically light on logistics and heavy on promise.
The Cure's pull on other artists keeps showing up in ROMBO's pages, from American Football's take on "Boys Don't Cry" to the steady stream of covers that follow the band around. A catalog that porous tends to invite reinvention; the interesting question in 2027 is whether the new songs arrive already knowing what they are, or whether Smith lets the audience finish them first. More in ROMBO's Cure archive.
