There are victories that feel overdue and victories that feel almost surreal. For The Cure, winning their first-ever Grammy Awards in 2026, half a century after they formed, somehow manages to be both.
During the early portion of the ceremony, the band were honoured with Best Alternative Music Performance for the song “Alone.” Minutes later, their 2024 record Songs of a Lost World was named Best Alternative Music Album, completing a quietly historic night for a group that long ago stopped measuring success in trophies.
The moment, however, arrived in sombre circumstances. The band were unable to attend the event, as they were at the funeral of longtime member Perry Bamonte, who died in late December at the age of 65. Celebration and grief collided in the way real life often insists on doing.
In their absence, singer Robert Smith sent a prepared message, read onstage by Americana artist Jesse Welles. Smith thanked the Recording Academy for the “wonderful award” before turning attention away from the industry and back toward the people who had carried the band through five decades.
“And most importantly, all the Cure fans around the world who came to our Lost World shows and enjoyed our Lost World music,” the message concluded. “Without you, none of this would be possible.”
It was a typically understated response from a band that has spent its entire career existing slightly to the side of expectation. The Cure were never built to chase validation; they simply outlasted the need for it.
Formed in 1976 in England, the group became one of the defining voices of the 1980s, shaping entire subcultures with records that were both fragile and monumental. Their influence stretched far beyond charts, into fashion, mood, and the private inner lives of millions who found something recognisable in Smith’s particular strain of melancholy.
Yet despite their stature, Grammy recognition had always slipped just out of reach. In 1993, Wish was nominated for Best Alternative Music Album but lost to Tom Waits’ Bone Machine. Eight years later, Bloodflowers fell in the same category to Radiohead’s Kid A, defeats that, in hindsight, feel less like snubs and more like footnotes in a story already complete.
Songs of a Lost World, the album that finally brought the win, arrived after a long period of silence. It was greeted not as a comeback but as a continuation, proof that The Cure had not mellowed into nostalgia but were still capable of making music that felt present and alive.
Fifty years on, they have awards to place beside the memories, though, characteristically, it is the memories that seem to matter more.
