Mixes Of A Lost World is, quite simply, the most ambitious, accomplished, and emotionally resonant remix album we’ve ever encountered.

While most remix collections tend to function as appendices or bonus discs for completists, Mixes Of A Lost World has the gravity and solemnity of something far more substantial, playing not like an afterthought, but an intricate, reverent reimagining of what may well be The Cure’s final studio statement, delivered by a vast and carefully curated selection of artists, each bringing the full weight of their own legacy to bear, and what results is something that doesn’t merely elevate the original Songs Of A Lost World but expands it into an expansive double-disc transmission that feels like a farewell to the entire lineage of music that The Cure have helped shape.

It belongs less to the category of remix album and more to the rare air occupied by posthumous tributes or career-spanning anthologies. It is enormous, and utterly absorbing. The album that provides the source material was already a weighty record, giving fans a deeply atmospheric, slow-moving procession of grey skies and crumbling faith, an album for people who had grown older with The Cure and could sit in the vastness of a seven-minute song and feel held by sorrow. Mixes Of A Lost World explodes those tracks outward into entirely new forms. What was once introverted and insular now becomes panoramic, with rhythm, repetition, texture, tension, shape, structure, and dynamic flow.

Mixes Of A Lost World has been sequenced with extreme care, resulting in a deep, hypnotic, and profoundly moving journey through multiple generations of electronic and experimental music, and it’s difficult to overstate the calibre of talent assembled here. From the opening trio - Paul Oakenfold, Orbital, Daniel Avery - you’re already witnessing three titans of UK club culture, offering restrained and stately openers with all the mood of a smoke-filled cathedral. The Cure’s Endsong was originally all slow mourning and gothic resignation, but Orbital transpose it into something triumphant with major intervals blooming into something defiant and huge, and it’s going to slay in a live setting. Then Daniel Avery brings in a denser, darker presence, nudging us closer to the rhythms of the club. By track four, we finally slip into a true house tempo, and from there, the groove holds, locked into a heady forward motion. By the time Four Tet’s remix of Alone rolls around, we’re locked into a beautiful groove, a masterclass in restraint and uplift, with a feather-light touch to the production that floats rather than thumps.

It’s remarkable how natural The Cure sounds in these surroundings. You wouldn’t instinctively place them at the centre of a techno compliation, yet here they are, utterly at home, their fingerprints visible across the entire spectrum of electronic music. The gothic romanticism, aching synth tones, and slow, cavernous, melancholy are the very textures that electronic artists have been sculpting for decades. The sequencing is masterful. Hooks recur, but always with twenty or thirty minutes distance between them like leitmotifs in a sprawling operatic symphony. The sense of scale is especially apparent in the final stretch as Chino Moreno, 65daysofstatic, and Mogwai close the record out in towering form with glacial grandeur and emotional weight. By the final act, we’re in the terrain of post-rock and heavy, widescreen guitar music.

This remix album is a reminder that The Cure’s influence stretches not just across genres, but generations. There are very few rock bands - maybe none - who can convincingly lay claim to having shaped so many disparate strands of music all while maintaining such a singular identity, and Mixes Of A Lost World is a full-spectrum tribute.

The album is a two-and-a-half-hour journey that demands time, attention, and a proper chunk of your day to take in fully. While you could dip in for the highlights, it’s best understood as one long, glittering celebration of The Cure’s legacy with an opening suite of low-slung tension building gradually into a vast middle section of club-ready euphoria before cresting into a final stretch that is absolutely enormous, both emotionally and sonically. There are so many moments on Mixes Of A Lost World where you completely lose yourself, taking everything people cherish about The Cure and lifting those ingredients out of time. Robert Smith’s voice and melodies loop and refract through these tracks like he’s suspended in space, and the effect is hypnotic. There’s a warmth running through even the darkest moments, and reverence from every artist involved. This is an album built not just from beats and effects, but from deep admiration. A gathering of artists across generations and genres, all bringing their absolute best to honour one of the greatest bands in music history. A beautiful, utterly deserved celebration of Robert Smith and The Cure in all their tragic glory. Set aside a long afternoon, clear your head, and let Mixes Of A Lost World wash over you from front to back.