At Brighton Electric, a warren of rock rehearsal spaces in an old brick tram depot in the English seaside town of Brighton, young guitar luggers stream in and out while the thudding jams of baby bands reverberate throughout the building.

But a corridor in the back leads to a spacious, gear-crammed private studio occupied by the Cure — the multiplatinum band that defined a gloomy strand of British post-punk and scored international hits with spiky confections like “Friday I’m in Love.” On a recent Sunday, the band was gathered to prepare for promotional gigs supporting “Songs of a Lost World,” its first studio album in 16 years, out now.Seated beside his guitar rig was Robert Smith, the group’s leader, explaining his reluctance in recent years to do an interview. “I don’t really want my head to be drawn back into this idea that I’m ‘Robert Smith of the Cure,’ ” he said, raising a blue-shadowed brow. “It just doesn’t suit me anymore.”

Yet at 65, he is still unmistakable as Robert Smith of the Cure, dressed all in black, with a smear of lipstick and his signature tangled mop of dark hair, now a shade of ash. At the Cure’s commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, he was a dandy prince of the alternative scene, his disheveled haystack inspiring not just a look but an entire indie-kid personality type — the lovesick goth — while the band charted a path through melancholic angst (“Boys Don’t Cry”), danceable ear candy (“Just Like Heaven”) and an expansive, moody neo-psychedelia (“Pictures of You”) that made it a model for generations of artists.

Formed in 1976, the Cure — with Smith its only constant member — has remained vital well after it departed the upper rungs of the charts, with a fiercely loyal fan base that flocks to the band’s sprawling, three-hour live shows. Recently Smith has unexpectedly become a prominent voice calling for reform in the bewildering world of concert ticketing, where prices are spinning out of control and fans are often left feeling frustrated, confused or ripped off.

In a series of social media posts last year that rallied fans and enthralled the music industry, Smith drew attention to the problems that surrounded the sale of tickets for the band’s most recent tour. He channeled fan complaints, railed against scalpers and complained to Ticketmaster over fees that in some cases had doubled the cost of an order. “I am as sickened as you all are,” he told fans in a characteristic all-caps post on the social media platform X.

Coming just a few months after Ticketmaster’s meltdown during the presale for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, his efforts added pressure to the company and its corporate parent, Live Nation, and demonstrated the power that a star can wield, if only they are willing to stick their neck out. Within a day of Smith’s complaint, Ticketmaster agreed to issue partial refunds to fans.

“It was one of those moments I thought, ‘No, I’m not letting this go,’ ” Smith recalled. “And so I didn’t.”

Over more than two hours of conversation, Smith spoke about the long gestation of “Songs of a Lost World,” his late- career shift into hands-on management of the Cure’s business and the lessons he learned from his clash with the most powerful company in live music. And he spoke with some astonishment at simply surviving a life of rock, to the point where the Cure is approaching the half-century mark — an odd milestone for a man who sang “Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die” in 1985.

“If I go back to how I was when I was a younger man, my plan was to keep doing this till I fall over,” Smith said in the studio. “My idea of when I fell over wasn’t this old.”

“Songs of a Lost World,” the Cure’s 14th studio album, might well have never happened.

When the last iteration of the Cure fell apart, after the tour that followed the band’s 2008 album, “4:13 Dream,” Smith said he was left feeling drained. He no longer wanted to be in the band and toyed with making a solo album. But after a break, he reconfigured the group, and by 2011 restarted it as a live vehicle; for nearly a decade, the Cure toured solely on its thick back catalog.

Smith was still writing songs, and after curating the Meltdown festival in London in 2018 — the 40th anniversary of the Cure’s first single — he felt reinvigorated. Recording sessions the next year generated enough material for multiple albums, although the pandemic delayed completing them.

Smith works in his home studio on the south coast of England; he left London when he turned 30 in a determined lifestyle change after years of rock-star-level drinking and drug use. He has been married for 36 years, and his daily life suggests the jumbled diaries of a middle- class retiree and an obsessive auteur. He goes for long walks listening to music on an iPod and has never owned a smartphone.

But “Songs of a Lost World,” which Smith says is the first entry in a possible trilogy, is one of the darkest albums he has made. It is an eight-song suite of despair, rage and brooding thoughts of a life — and maybe a planet — that has fallen into what he calls an “inexorable slide.”

“I think it’s natural, as you grow older, to feel more and more despairing of what goes on,” Smith said. “Because you’ve seen it all before and you see the same mistakes being made. And I feel like we’re going backwards.”

For the Cure’s first North American tour in seven years, Smith was determined to keep prices affordable, making sure that venues had seats at $20 or $25 — an extraordinarily low entry point for an arena show at a time when the average cost of a seat for one of the top 100 tours is $131, according to the trade publication Pollstar.

In part, he was thinking about his youngest fans. Although he has no children, “I have an enormous family now, a wider family,” he said. “And I know how they struggle just to live.”

The band’s business contacts insisted that the prices were unrealistic, that Smith’s plans “ran contrary to all proven business practice and that it would be a complete disaster,” Smith said. But he didn’t buy it.

In the years after “4:13 Dream,” the Cure was without a label or management, and Smith began to study closely the economics of the business he had been in since he was a teenager. He decided that a tour could be run profitably on a small budget and with modest ticket prices. To ensure that tickets ended up with fans and not scalpers, he used Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan registration system and made tickets nontransferable. The band also did not use dynamic pricing, which allows prices to fluctuate (usually up) with demand.

Soon after tickets went on sale, things began to go haywire. Fans complained of problems, and scalpers went as far as trading “aged” Ticketmaster accounts to get their hands on Cure seats. Then a screenshot ricocheted through social media showing that fees added $92 to an order of four $20 tickets. On March 15, 2023, Smith said he had asked Ticketmaster to justify those fees; the next day, he said the company had agreed to return up to $10 for each Verified Fan order. In a podcast interview last year, Michael Rapino, CEO of Live Nation, said the decision had cost the company a “million dollars or so.”

The tour ended up being the Cure’s most successful ever, selling about $37.5 million in tickets in North America. Smith is also proud of the merchandise sales; by offering T-shirts for $25 instead of $50, he said, the Cure sold twice as many.

Yet he scoffs at a suggestion that his campaign was a victory. He called the episode a mere “skirmish” and said Ticketmaster’s refund did not fundamentally change anything about a system driven to maximize profit at the expense of fans.

“Live Nation were perceived to have caved in. But their decision was made because it looked good. It was optics.” He added, with exasperation: “In the grand scheme of things, it’s like peanuts.”

Smith made clear that he had no regrets.

“In a small way, by understanding how we do what we do,” he said, “when we actually walk out onstage and I become that person who sings, I feel really happy about how we’ve got there.”